Should I go and pull her burqa off?:: Feminist compulsions, insider consent, and a Return to Kandahar

I examine Nelofer Pazira and Paul Jay's 2004 documentary, Return to Kandahar. The film's narrative revolves around Pazira's search for a friend (Pazira is an Afghani-Canadian). At one point, Pazira asks herself, "Should I go and pull her burqa off?" Given how the invasion of Afghanistan was cloaked in supposedly feminist desires to liberate Afghani women, it is not surprising that this question implies a "benevolent" or "modernizing" intervention. I focus on how Pazira asks this question of herself as an Afghan subject (a reflective question) but in the presence of a Western audience. Although this may support contemporary debates around authority over voice and representation, it also produces the native informant: the classic anthropological sidekick who tells her faithful audience about the novel idiosyncrasies of her "traditional" society while inviting various interventionist discourses. I thus argue that Return to Kandahar is not merely a site where series of discourses including feminist interventionist compulsions and Orientalist tropes on modernity and Islam are negotiated, it is also a site where Pazira becomes an Orientalized insider subject who mediates the audience's encounter with the Other; she is positioned within a supposedly traditional society and yet also exposed enough to modernity to speak to the audience. My discussion is organized around the question Pazira asks herself about taking off a woman's burqa: the voyeuristic witnessing of a conversation supposedly occurring within the text between the Afghan female subject and herself thus becomes a site to know, and ultimately intervene in the affairs of, the temporally-distanced "non-modern" Other.