Why do people marry? Or better: Why do they couple? While marriage and coupling practices seem to correspond with obvious biological and social necessities, a more targeted question might include: Why do they choose to couple or marry with the people that they do? And, what happens when they marry someone who is perceived as different from themselves?

Admittedly, such overgeneralized questions are, of course, accompanied by the underpinning assumption that the modern, Western social practice of marriage is largely accepted as a contract between two individuals based on both their free will and their affection for or commitment to one another. However, the cultural normative characterizations of both marital practices and courtship rituals show great variability in different historical contexts, and as Stephanie Coontz shows in her work, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, marriage as an emotion-based, state-sanctioned union is a relatively recent social invention. This leaves the task of defining marriage a difficult one. Over time, courtship and marital practices have taken many forms. In some contexts, to marry was a privilege, in others a necessity. Even in the present time, the tension between its dual meaning—both as a legal contract and as an emotional relationship— persists, and academic definitions vary. Anthropologist, Edmund Leach, for example, defines marriage as “a set of legal rules” that largely determines inheritance between generations. Coontz, by contrast, notes the limitations of this definition and goes further to define it instead as a social practice that “determines rights and obligations connected to sexuality, gender roles, relationships with in-laws, and the legitimacy of children.” However, no matter the changing legal or social characterizations, the practice of marriage has always, at its core, represented the connectedness of individuals—connectedness between participants, between families, between larger kinship and social networks, and even between societies. The marriages that make up the subject of this work transcended national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and connected individuals across the Atlantic.

Introduction

Varying day-to-day activities that humans experience at different times are important and pivotal to their existence, many of which are also valuable when shared with others. Advancing the course of society requires that people are intimated with the activities of individuals whose existence is especially rich with educative exploits from which others can learn. Therefore, storytelling by individuals or groups is essential because it foregrounds the experiences of the ones telling them and how their relationship with each story affects them and their society. The consequence is that people are enlightened about many of the steps they will eventually take, making it possible for them to predict the outcome of any decision to advance their individual or collective course. Although telling a story demands that the narrator has reliable memory that would not fail when regurgitating past experiences, this is usually cardinal to record-keeping because a story told without any regard for genuineness will lose its narratorial value. It is important that stories are told strictly by experts who understand the art of organizing historical events in ways that will appeal to the readers.

It is pertinent to state that the memoirs I engage with reveal a considerate attempt to explore autobiographical writing and theory regarding relational and autonomous lives in communal spaces. The memoirs discussed in this book demonstrate that the authors engage in an autonomous, singular, and unitary narration with themselves while simultaneously emphasizing their narratives as they interpenetrate and mutually cross with others to create a whole new dimension of experiences. The memoirs that will be investigated in this writing are authored by individuals who experienced the colonial power play and the eventual postcolonial realities that have continued to widely shape the lives of the African people.

Types of Stories

There are several types and forms of stories, having definitive qualities that separate them from the arrays of others. For example, there are biographies, autobiographies, fiction, and even memoirs, all of which have varying characteristics that differentiate them from others. In a memoir, there is a thin distinction that makes it different from an autobiography. While the latter is about the chronological experiences of the writer, the former dwells essentially on a part of the person’s history, giving enough information about that particular experience.

Deeply opposing truth claims in society and journalism and broad epistemic divides where each side takes the other’s “truth” to be an existential threat, are entering a new phase. The world order is quickly shifting around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. President Zelensky’s pleading with allies to assist in a total war for democracy changed global public opinion and opened many locked doors. In less than thirty minutes, Germany turned decades of pacifist policy on its head voting to better arm itself and join the cause. Authoritarian leaders in Poland, Hungry and Turkey have also rallied to the call and even the traditionally neutral countries of Finland and Sweden are forced to take a stand. On the other side, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are already behind a curtain so opaque barely a crack is left to see what support or resistance they might yet offer Mr. Putin. Like Korea or Vietnam and other proxy wars fought by the United States and its allies, it is again happening with a foreground threat of a nuclear response. The ghost of the undecidable will surely appear now given the NATO alliance has promised not to intervene militarily to stop what is becoming a genocide of civilians turned into suicide soldiers as millions of women and children leave or are displaced. All of this is brought to us by journalists and much of it is portrayed not just on cable television but available through real cell phone video time.

While the trend for social media over the last decade points toward a more nefarious effect on democracy, the biggest surprise may turn out to be how quickly social media can be used to create a democratic citizen’s army. As Newton (2022) puts it: “This is a surprise for social networks seemed to play a key role in democracy’s doom loop.” Recall that social media platforms began as profit-seeking businesses without borders. As 2.0 communications began narrowcasting and creating interactive communities, they emancipated users from authorities and media gatekeepers by substituting a journalisme vérité or direct local citizens posting of information and opinion in place of submitting to editorial checks, press councils, and professional norms. Citizen’s journalism enjoyed a brief period of revolutionary promise before the model would give way to something more nefarious.

In Chapter 5, I will continue my exploration of Grand-Guignol cinema through Claire Denis’ controversial modern tale of vampirism, entitled Trouble Every Day (2001), along with other key films from the French cinema of sensation. Like Jean Rollin’s Fascination, Denis’ film chooses not to present her blood-drinkers as supernatural entities. Yet unlike in Rollin’s film, the appetite for blood is associated, in Denis’s film, with the history of French colonialism. My examination of this film is particularly shaped by the important work of anticolonial theorist and revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. While the narrative turns on a classic “return of the repressed” structure, I will examine Trouble Every Day in between psychoanalytical framework and affect studies as developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. My use of the term “affect studies” rather than “affect theory” is in keeping with the heterogeneous weaving of elements incorporating anticolonial perspectives with phenomenology (Sobchack 2004), as well as with other studies on sensation and embodiment (Shaviro 1993; Marks 2000; Beugnet 2007). Aside from a few, preliminary studies, scholarship on affect in horror studies is only just beginning to make waves (Powell, 2005; Reyes, 2012 and 2016), and I believe it is a very important area of study for the genre going forward.

Following these scholarly currents, I am choosing in this chapter to pursue my exam-ination of affect in Grand-Guignol cinema through the sense of touch, or what Laura Marks has called “haptic visuality” (2000). The problematic designations of “French extremity” to the films studied in this chapter—and “torture porn” to American films such as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2006)—reflects a somatophobia that understands sensation as too excessive for analysis (Quandt, 2004; Edelstein, 2006). I am bringing these perspectives together as a political intervention that is concerned with epistemology, sensation and power. Reading Fanon alongside Vivian Sobchack, Steven Shaviro and Laura Marks is an important expansion towards making the corporeal, as well as the specificity of race and gender, central to film studies.

As early as 1935, Walter Benjamin began to think and write about media reception as tactile (2008). For Benjamin, “tactile quality” withered away the bourgeois experience of contemplation in the sensorial experiences of new reproductive medias (2008: 39).

If journalists rarely address the actual subjects of migration, inequality or cultural and religious diversity as their implied audience, it follows that public understanding of the experience of these subjects is partially grasped at best. To help fill this lacuna, media sociology needs to account for the exotopy or outsidedness that gives a two-sided surplus of seeing between in-groups and out-groups, haves and have-nots and symbolic forms of wedoms and theydoms all of which orientate the journalist (Hartley 1998). As seen in Chapter 5, journalists frame stories about have-nots and those outside the commons to their have audiences and not the other way around. Unraveling how conditions are framed in acts of journalism points to where we can begin to think about how to expand the implied audience by including a journalist in the reported speech through a co-experience with the excluded. Each side might see the other in ways the other cannot see themself.

This chapter presents a third example of how acts of journalism both contribute to the civil sphere and to social exclusion in coverage on controversies about cultural and religious diversity. It also demonstrates yet another version of the current historical partisan, epistemic and existential division in Western societies. Are laws banning the burqa, niqab or hijab in schools in France, Belgium and some German Landers as well as some schools in the UK all exceptional measures? Is the 2021 Swiss referendum vote narrowly in favor of banning face coverings in public not uniquely aimed at recent Islamic migrants? The banning of any religious symbols by Quebec public officials as required by Bill 21 in 2019 is similar to these cases in that the wearing of any ostentatious religious signs is banned for certain public-sector workers. The question arises as to how much of the contemporary public discussion is simply a recasting of an older colonial story about who is a citizen and who is an outcast. The answer is that liberal democratic societies, despite their constitutions and rights charters, have always masked paradoxical limits and uneven definitions for the meanings of equality, freedom of expression, mobility and assembly (Badiou 2012, 2017; Rancière 2005; Mouffe 2000).

History written within the framework of the nation is as distorted as it is incomplete. From these caged perspectives, instances of transnational coupling and marriage were too often treated as curious anomalies that violated norms and could only be explained by the economic motives of the participants. The marriages examined here however were deeply embedded in a profound cultural relationship between these two societies. Of course, these subjects were only a small subset of a larger population that occupied the Atlantic space, but by carving out these small moments in the past, and examining them through cultural and emotional lens, a more fruitful historical perspective of recent discussions about the nature of transnational cultures and the definitions of marriage and family formation emerges.

This book has provided an examination of two different patterns of Franco-American marriage that occurred in two very different historical contexts. In the nineteenth century, transnational marriages between France and the United States largely occurred between wealthy, elite Americans and those that they perceived to be their socio-economic equivalent—European aristocrats. Linked within same social networks, these elite transnationalmarriage participants often spoke the same languages, shared common values, read similar literature, and performed similar cultural rituals. This paired with their unrestricted movement between different urban centers such as New York, London, and Paris meant that their marital unions often emerged out of spaces that were not entirely defined by national boundaries. The coming of World War I then effectively ended elite domination of the transnational space that existed between France and the United States and allowed for a geographic mobility of the working, rural, and middle classes who engaged in the conflict. By bringing an entire new group of people into the sphere of transnationality, World War I and its consequences changed not only the power relations between France and the United States but also the dimensions of broader cultural encounters and social spaces that existed between the two. In this context, wartime-marriage participants were not members of a socially homogenized, transnational social network that effortlessly carved out an existence and moved freely beyond national boundaries as their nineteenth-century counterparts had but were instead American soldiers and local French women who were largely restricted by both the conflict around them and the national boundaries that were tangibly manifested in their everyday lives.

Introduction

Romani and Gypsy Travellers have contributed to British society for centuries. The first arrival of Romani’s in Britain dates between 1427 and 1508 (Foster and Norton 2012). The direct ancestors of one of the authors, a Romani Gypsy, can be traced back to 1490, and are buried under the foundations of the All Hallows Church in London. There is also DNA evidence from the mid-eleventh century that suggests some arrived via a Viking enslavement from the eastern Mediterranean (Pitts 2006). There is huge diversity among the Romani population depending on their geographical location. They include Romanichals in the United Kingdom; Kalé in Wales, Finland and Sweden; alongside Manouche from France and Sinti from Germany, Poland, Austria and Italy (Toninato 2009). Other distinct groups include English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Travellers (Traveller Movement 2021), also known as Pavees or Mincéirs ( Joyce 2018). There is evidence that places Irish Travellers as far back as the fifth century AD, although they have also been referred to as the descendants of the dispossessed from the war with Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century (Foster and Norton 2012:87).

Romani Gypsy Traveller populations are not homogenous, but nomadism, extended family networks and unique languages (Millan and Smith 2019:1) are central to their cultural identity. As the title of this chapter suggests, their history is also coloured with centuries of inequalities and discrimination. This chapter outlines the significant inequalities and disadvantages they face across the social policy spectrum (employment, education, housing and health), before focusing on the impact of contemporary issues such as austerity policies, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill. The chapter includes both academic and grey literature, as well informal conversations with Romani, Gypsy Travellers. In a small effort to break the continuous cycle of inequalities, this chapter ends with recommendations for how ‘gorgers’ (non-Gypsies) can be allies.

An Important Note about Terminology and the Research Cited

The generic term Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT), often used to describe members of ethnic groups who are or have been traditionally nomadic (Rogers 2021), is a problematic term due to its capacity to erase.

A Potted History

Young people are becoming increasingly marginalised across the world and are often experiencing generational forms of injustice through the failures of government and society to acknowledge their vulnerabilities and provide appropriate support. The framing of ‘Youth’ is a complex social construction which involves a ‘blurring of boundaries between youth and adulthood’ (Reisinger 2012:96) and the de-standardisation of life. Modern understandings of youth stress that ‘youth’ has become non-linear and complex and repeatedly is a site of uncertainty and change. Furthermore, countless young people experience a variety of social harms and inequalities across many distinctive policy domains: especially in relation to youth justice and criminalisation, employment and education.

Disturbingly, the onset of global austerity has continued to reshape and diminish youth welfare policy. Indeed, the dual impact of the 2008 global recession and COVID-19 continues to impact upon the efficacy and range of social policy responses in areas such as youth justice, youth work, welfare and support, housing, health and education. As a result, contemporary global youth are currently experiencing generational social harm(s) and social othering whilst often being denied a voice in the societies they live in. If truth be told, the youth of today are experiencing new forms of social injustice and, to add insult to injury, these developments have become worse as the COVID-19 epidemic has persistently decreased living standards for many young people around the world. Concerns about the marginalisation of young people from all the relevant social and political structures are repeatedly emerging, yet negative portrayals of young people – framed around ‘irresponsibility’ and ‘risky behaviours’ – continually contradict demonstrable evidence that expounds the opposite as many young people have sought to volunteer and support others whilst experiencing significant forms of social harm themselves.

Human trafficking and modern slavery in the present day is defined as the transportation or concealment of an individual or group of persons against their will by means of force, kidnapping or coercion (Bondt et al. 2010). Despite increased freedoms and civil rights in the modern day, human trafficking is a considerably ubiquitous form of organised crime, primarily due to being the second most lucrative crime today (Sheinis 2012).

A Contextual Introduction

Ethnic minority Uyghur Muslims residing in Xinjiang, China, have long endured a history of discriminatory practices at the hands of the Chinese government (Enos 2019). Certainly, the historical relationship between the Uyghur Muslims and China was, and still is, characterised by conflict and complexity. The dynamics of this relationship became further entangled in political complications during the post– 9/11 epoch. The tolerance of the Chinese government towards ethnic minority Uyghurs began to rapidly decline and a burgeoning discourse of terrorism was exercised to justify the unrelenting persecution of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang (Van Wie Davis 2008; Enos 2019; Raza 2019; Zenz 2019a). Based on government reports that re-education ‘centres’ (which essentially were and are detention camps) for Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang were implemented around 2013 and the scale of these political re-education camps (with their insidious connotations) began to rapidly increase to unprecedented levels in Spring 2017 when Chen Quanguo was appointed as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s (XUAR) new party secretary (Zenz 2019a).

Moreover, Chinese officials, after initially denying the existence of these re-education ‘camps’, acknowledged and justified their existence on the instruction of the Chinese Communist Party who decreed that all Uyghurs possess extremist beliefs and separatist ideologies that pose a threat to China. Thus, the ‘camps’ evoked a means to eliminate ‘threats to China’s territorial integrity, government and population’ (Maizland 2019: no page). A report by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) (2020:273) suggested that ‘as many as 800,000 to 1.1 million individuals had been or remained detained at such facilities since around April 2017’. Indeed, over the course of 2018, authorities in the XUAR increased the intensity of pervasive surveillance in order to target Uyghur Muslims ‘resulting in detention and severe limits on their freedom of movement, expression and religion’ (CECC 2020:273).

Even so, the full extent of the historically complicated relationship between Uyghur Muslims and China, that has resulted in the construction of political re-education centres and mass detainment of Uyghurs, transcends far beyond the limited scope of this case study. However, this chapter on the detainment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang will be divided into two broader sections in an endeavour to assert the applicability of this case to the particular theoretical rationalisations of ‘State crime’ and ‘corporate crime’ whilst critically analysing theoretical implications of ‘social harm’.

This chapter examines the Val Lewton-produced and Robert Wise-directed film The Body Snatcher (1945), as well as other key Grand-Guignol films in the censorship period (1934–68), in order to challenge the binary-driven hierarchical placement of terror over horror in the history of scholarship. In doing so, in this chapter I use sight, as the sense most associated with lowbrow horror, as a framing device for understanding Grand-Guignol cinema, and intersectionally to highlight class issues. My analysis is not meant to be an exhaustive account of vision, such as in the work of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1992), but to challenge the terror/horror binary through “obscured” class asymmetries. I am instead interested in how sight in the horror genre has been associated with moral panics, from EC Comics to the ‘Video Nasties’ VHS panic in the UK, and on to horror video games today. I also look at how issues regarding sight in Grand-Guignol cinema operated under the Hays Code censorship in the US, at a time when horrifying gore was forbidden. In this way, I want to the highlight sight, often perceived as the “highest” sense and associated with en(light)enment, as key in the reception of “low art” disgust and voyeurism. Traditional gaze theories function around a fear of images and equate being passionately fascinated with them as a form of mystification (Mulvey, 1989). The horror genre has been associated with sadistic voyeurism in film studies. I want to instead re-think the notion of voyeurism more productively, opening lines of flight in its conceptualisation in terms of Grand-Guignol cinema. Because the horror genre is about emotions, fear and disgust primarily, its viewer is arguably not disengaged, as in gaze theorisation, but quite the opposite: affectively immersed. Steven Shaviro’s work in The Cinematic Body (1993) in this regard is trailblazing. Within it he situates voyeurism, not as an active sadism, but as a passive “captivation” (1993: 48). I am rethinking sadism in relation to queer SM practices that understand it through active masochism, which redefines sadism in the horror film from the vantage point of masochistic audiences (Clover, 1992).