The Burqa-clad woman, terror and the postcolony: the Kabul Beauty School and the art of imperial friendship and freedom

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Kabul Beauty School: The Art of Friendship and Freedom (2008) is a memoir written by the American beautician, Deborah Rodriguez. It recounts her individual story in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban and the work Western programs of “economic empowerment” and humanitarian agencies of “social emancipation” have done to “reconstruct” the war-torn nation. This involvement in the raw, however, does not exist in some kind of political vacuum. The leaders of these global programs of humanitarian action and “sustainable development” represent an array of neo-compradors: social enterprisers and partisan actors, selling “the burqa-clad woman” of Afghanistan the illusion of economic independence and “social emancipation” through local micro-projects and self-employment initiatives. The language of these agencies of social entrepreneurship and humanitarian service offers a wide-ranging discursive domain within which post-9/11 “counter-terroristic formations” (Boehmer and Morton 2010, 7) thrived in an explosion of distinct discursivities, taking form in pedagogy, morality, sexuality, medical care, philanthropy, beauty industry, women’s emancipation, human rights activism and international security and safety measures. These regimes of knowledge and expertise provide important sites of critical inquiry through which counter-terror can be conceptually subverted and discursively deconstructed as part of a larger system of global control and management, within which neo-liberal politics operate at the interface between the metropolis and the postcolony.