The afterword reflects on the book’s findings and asks: what are the changes in the structure of public discourses about LGBT asylum in the UK that could empower asylum seekers, allow for a greater fairness in decision-making, and decolonise queer hospitality? It identifies several issues in public discourses, starting with a queer/race fragmentation which makes it harder for the voices that do not articulate their politics using the dominant liberal or universalist modes to be heard and disseminated in public arenas. A second suggestion is that freer testimonial practices should be fostered so that asylum-seekers can re-appropriate the hermeneutical function of self-narration in order to start a process of self-crafting that eschews homonationalist narrative. Finally, opening up public arenas to the complex and often challenging stories told in queer refugee performance could also enable the emergence of political propositions that are anti-racist, anti-homo and transphobic and attentive to the particular challenges of migrant experiences at the nexus of political and administrative subjection, ethno-racial, gendered and sexualised violence.

This chapter explores ethnography as an ethical process. I begin with the relationship between ethics, epistemology and social theory in approaching questions of justice. Through a detailed account of the development of my fieldwork, I explore the ethical limitations of binary theoretical languages for communicating about the Palestine-Israel conflict and begin to imagine and inhabit alternative vocabularies, which I learnt in my relationships with students. By attending to themes of proximity and distance in fieldwork, I explore how, as ethnographers, we never fully know ourselves but rather engage in a process of learning. This insight is shaped and exemplified through an account of my own ambivalences, exclusions and transformations in the research process; I go through a process of renaming myself as I learn to engage with my research subjects differently. This becomes part of a questioning of moral traditions, embedded in the university itself, that call on people to abstract themselves from everyday relationships so that they can exist as rational, ‘objective’ moral selves. As I introduce alternative resources for approaching questions of ethics and justice, I also build on Judith Butler’s appeal towards post-secular diasporic traditions as offering important ethico-political resources for responding to the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Retracing the development of working-class suburbia from the 1930s to the 1980s, this overview of French suburb films points to the capital’s mythical, derelict ‘zone’ as a creative matrix from which subsequent production would draw its primary social types and themes. Home to rag-pickers, streetwalkers and petty criminals, the zone outlying the Paris fortifications supplied powerful images and tropes that reinforced the perceived division between city centre and suburb. Against the backdrop of the transformation of the sordid ‘black belt’ of the interwar zone into the post-war ‘red belt’, Fourcaut details the layered quality of the suburban filmic imaginary through reference to scores of mainstream narrative films. Each period supplies its own representational codes to fulfil relatively stable functions of plot and character while actively taking stock of the changing material and demographic realities of greater Paris. Themes of escapism, poverty and dereliction point toward the ethnically diverse banlieue film that would emerge in the 1980s and most significantly in the mid-1990s.

In the UK FOI policy developed in a series of phases. This chapter covers the first stage of the development covered the first eight months, from Labour entering power in May 1997 to the publication of the White Paper Your Right to Know in December 1997. At this point, FOI appeared to avoid the ‘symbolic’ trap and overt conflict so frequently seen elsewhere. A small, well-connected group of crusaders inside government took advantage of their own power and used a favourable context to neutralise opposition, with a rapid process lending momentum to a far-Reaching policy. Their efforts resulted in a hugely symbolic White Paper, rapidly formulated, that offered one of the most radical FOI regimes yet seen in the world. The vision was of a political redistribution of power opening up even the very centre of government decision-making (Terrill 2000). However, doubts remained over the policy, its workability and the levels of support for it in government.

This chapter examines the security challenges as they have recently been articulated with regard to minorities. The fear of Islam, radicalisation and terrorism from Muslim populations is seen as a religious issue whereas the real issue is their lack of integration. Multi-generational poverty, a lack of education are still not being addressed. The chapter examines specific cases of armed violence and places them in the context of minority socio-economic problems. Secondly the chapter looks at the historical parallels between how native populations were treted under colonialism and how postcolonial minorities are treated now.

Assessing popular comedies and dramas, the author argues that in 1930s French cinema the banlieue is an ‘imagined community’ that resists transfer to a map. Its dual function as a space of social relegation and popular entertainment correlates to a specifically Parisian social geography where the affluent, verdant west contrasts sharply with the industrial northeast. Suburban locales allow the exploration of themes ranging from proletarian downfall (Le Jour se lève, Marcel Carné 1939) and murder (Cœur de Lilas, Anatole Litvak 1932) to open-air pleasure-seeking (Partie de campagne, Jean Renoir, 1936/1946) and the socialising dimension of popular song. By bringing together a variegated set of films from the left-leaning screenplays of Jacques Prévert to the Pétainist Notre-Dame de la Mouise (Robert Péguy, 1941), the author probes the tension inherent in the imagined banlieue between work and play, riches and poverty, redemption and despoilment.

The author addresses singularity, figural expression and transgression in three experimental shorts that picture the margins of Paris the better to interrogate the limits of cinematic language itself. To what extent might filmmakers who refuse the codes of an audience-ready cinema of the juste milieu stake a claim to an art of the periphery? Linking the working-class neighbourhood of its title to crime, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s silent Ménilmontant (1926) gestures towards melodrama even as it proposes an introduction to avant-garde film poetics. Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949), on Paris’s slaughterhouses, strikes a formal balance between poetic décor on the one hand and, on the other, the drama of livestock being steamed, stunned and decapitated. Deep generic instability and distanced humour characterise Raúl Ruiz’s off-kilter parody of surrealism Colloque de chiens (1977). Throughout these works, the internal and external borders of Paris work as zones of latent or overt violence to dissolve genre; scenes of fragmentation and dismemberment upend any pretention to a balanced and harmonious cinema of the juste milieu. The suburb becomes an ideal projective screen.

This chapters tells the story of the gradual movement, a tale of ‘modest incrementalism’ towards openness(Matthews 2015, 310). What began as too radical in the 1960s was becoming seemingly inevitable by the 1990s. Each ‘jump’ or reform moved FOI closer and entrenched its place on the agenda. Even the Thatcher governments, the most resolutely pro-secrecy, passed a series of access-to-information laws across local government and policy sectors. The chapter examines the frequent reform attempts through case studies of the Wilson governments (1964–70) and the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan (1974–79) and finally Major’s attempt to pass an ‘FOI light’ via his Code of Access. It ends by looking at the concurrent ‘locking in’ of transparency across local government in the UK.

This chapter argues that the production of queer liberalism is central to the affective politics of LGBT asylum: discourses on suffering and sympathy are central in the self-representation of queer liberals as sexual citizens with a claim to the state; and discourses on potential happiness are catalysts in the representation of refugees as an exhortation of happiness, and a cruel optimism. This analysis shows how the homonationalist configuration of public discourses is hinged upon representation of queer happiness (as an objective) and sympathy (as an affective relational mode).This chapter distinguishes between two affective modes of identification for liberal queers: the first is through the politics of sympathy and the potential identification of liberal queers with refugees; and the second works through a reconfiguration of discourses on sexual citizenship, nationhood and the appropriation by liberal queers of the wound of being queer embodied by refugees.