Afgan beauty school and Debbie Rodriguez

One my peers is doing a post-colonial study on the Afgan women images represented by the book chronicling Debbie Rodriguez's adventures in Afganistan. Well...ripe stuff to go at. Debbie is a typical mercenary and its a selfish account. As millions have done before and doing now, she is one more person who is participating in the exploitation of the vulnerable and in making them into exotic objects, objects of desire. Equally at fault is Random House...well the ultimate aim is to make money. And we as researchers, we must critique and pull it apart..why? Because we need a dissertation which rocks!! We need a subject to pull apart and establish our credentials. Maybe a book criticizing this book and the way it portrays the Afgan women. Here, my comments are more to do with the enterprise of research. Research has been and always will be a political enterprise and a colonial one at that. We create spaces like post-colonial, neo-colonial to highlight our scholarship, we choose eminent scholars and their articulation as a beacon not only to get direction but to have an anchor to our scholarship; to belong to a political group. Research has been and always will be a colonial enterprise. We use terms like solidarity to reinforce our positions and somehow convince ourselves and peer scholars that we are on the same footing as pour research participants. We use terms like foregrounding participants' voice..where? in our papers of course!! Somewhere in all this, the Afgan woman is lost, the voices silenced somewhere, someplace. ...