Journalism is the only job I did in Zimbabwe, starting as a novice in 1987 after graduating from Harare Polytechnic College with a degree in mass communication. I worked at the government’s Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation Radio Four. We produced educational programs. but for the most part it served as a government mouthpiece. All content was monitored, even the music we played on air.

As I got confident on the job, I was entrusted with hosting one of the popular but sensitive phone-in programs. I would invite various specialists in their field of work to talk about their vocations and how they were contributing to society. Listeners would call in and have their questions answered live on the air.

Government ministers began showing a lot of interest in this show, especially as elections approached. They started requesting to be interviewed.

Zimbabwe started deteriorating when its economy started sliding in the laste 1990s. This began when the government gave huge payouts to more than 36,000 unemployed former freedom fighters. The ripple effects were harrowing, and people started losing their jobs.

My journalistic nose for news started to itch. I remembered the training I had had—promoting transparency, holding the government accountable, and advocating for citizen’s rights. I lined up different government ministers to participate in my no-holds-barred live radio talk show. My aim was to discuss the impacts of government cuts and to investigate how people were managing as social services were reduced and privatized. As listeners exposed more and more government officials during these broadcasts, I found myself in a precarious situation.

I was cautioned. The phone calls from listeners were now being recorded before they were aired. The time allocated to this program was reduced. I began to be monitored closely, and all my spoken-word recordings were assessed before each broadcast. This was just the beginning of my woes.

How do citizens in exile view news from home? What’s the point of journalism that no one is consuming? Where does news go once persecuted reporters in exile hit “publish” on their stories?

Throughout this book, as was the case at the companion symposium on the University of Oregon campus in the spring of 2024, you are brought face-to-face with the grim realities many of our counterparts face in trying to get the news—the truth—to their audiences. In this chapter, we investigate how exiled citizens curate, filter, and interpret news from their home countries. Three journalist-students (deliberate wording) shoe-leathered into the homes and workplaces of individuals, each of them from nations that exert deplorable oppresions of press freedoms, in the Oregon Willamette Valley from Portland to Eugene to find out. What warms this teacher’s heart is to see the glow that the three selected reporters felt after getting this assignment. I can assure readers that this project solidified each of their respective resolves to speak truth to power, to appreciate their freedoms, and to tell stories that need daylight.

The three contributors, Julia Boboc, Malya Fass, and Mario Ponce Martinez de la Riva, offer diverse perspectives on the experiences of migrants far from home and the role of journalism. They delve into the challenges faced by immigrants in navigating news media, the impact of biased reporting, and the importance of diverse voices in journalism.

Boboc focuses on the stories of three immigrant women—from Mexico, Chile, and Colombia—exploring their news consumption habits and their desires for more inclusive and positive representation. Fass highlights the challenges faced by journalists in exile, particularly focusing on the experiences of an Afghan journalist who fled persecution. Ponce Martinez de la Riva delves into the experiences of Hispanic immigrants in the US, examining their perceptions of news media and their own identities.

That label that carried the word PRESS, I assumed, guaranteed my safety. But I was completely mistaken …

I loved to keep my press gear clean and shining after every round of escalation, preparing it for the next. I used to love wearing it despite the pain I felt as my body carried the heavy weight of it. I felt proud, and my kids felt proud seeing me in it too.

But since October 7, 2023, this reality and my entire life changed forever!

I remember that day vividly, and then the days, weeks, and months that followed. Every single day felt surreal, and I grasped to keep myself going.

It wasn’t the extreme exhaustion, the shock, the worry, and the constant threat to my life—all this was manageable.

What I couldn’t endure was the everyday danger that surrounded my precious ones: my husband and kids. I didn’t allow myself to even imagine the possibility of losing any of them, and I prayed I wouldn’t live to see it.

I reported about homes being targeted, neighborhoods completely wiped out, forced displacement of thousands of people. I reported about the beast of starvation slowly eating young and old, the thirst among everyone, and the challenges to get your battery charged, so you can have some light for your kids at night. I reported about widespread diseases and injuries most horrific among children.

Until I realized I was reporting about my own family’s suffering—about my own children, my own fears and hardships like any other mother around me!

But my kids weren’t as lucky as others, because I couldn’t be home with them during all this misery and despair. I wanted to scream many times: I am helpless for my children! I can’t keep them safe, full, or hydrated!

I couldn't keep them in my arms when those missiles fell around them!

Whenever someone speaks about threats to journalism, we tend to imagine physical violence or flagrant restrictions to free speech. Those are, for sure, the most concerning menaces that journalism now faces and the ones that need more attention since colleagues are risking their lives every day to guarantee the right of information. Nothing is more important than preserving them and amplifying their reporting. Many of the stories in this book are related to that kind of censorship and, as I am going to tell you later on, I have also suffered from it. However, a more common version of censorship is harder to identify, and that’s the reason why it spreads easily all over the world. Academics and communication theorists tend to refer to it as soft censorship or indirect censorship. Even when they don’t imply risk for life, their effects prevent both journalists from reporting freely according to public interest and the audience from enjoying their right of information and communication.

Since this kind of censorship is less noticeable, I will mention here a few examples from different countries to show that these kinds of restrictions to journalism are present all over the world. I hope that this will help contribute to finding possible ways to defend our societies from it.

This selection of cases was arbitrary. I learned about them from personal or professional experience. These are not the only countries in which this kind of censorship is taking place (because it happens in most of the countries of the world). These are also not the worst versions of what is occurring in those countries. But my own practice as a reporter taught me that it is better to avoid generalizations. If you can describe some events thoroughly in their context, you might help your audience not only to understand what is happening there, but also to reflect on other situations in which similar things are happening.

It's good to reflect every once in a while on how we’ve arrived to where we are. The choices we’ve made. Things that have happened to us.

Sometimes I tell people I won the lottery of life experience.

A big reason for that luck is that I’ve chosen unfamiliar paths, put myself in uncomfortable situations, never tried to avoid new experiences or people who were different than me. That led me to many unexpected opportunities. And later some problems.

I don't know if I’d make all those same choices today.

It's a very different world, and there are two threats germane to this book that I will address here—one to our personal sense of liberty, and the other to journalism.

When I was in my twenties, I traveled a lot. I had visited forty countries by the time I was twenty-five. The dollar was historically strong, and international travel had never been so accessible to so many young people.

Using my blue passport felt to me like a very American thing to do. To explore. Push beyond what I knew. Engage with people of different languages, cultures, and beliefs. It may not feel like it today, but those are core American values—always have been.

If my dad were alive and here today and you had the chance to talk to him, you’d quickly notice that he had a strong command of the English language and American idioms. But he also had a very thick accent.

So naturally people would ask him, “Where are you from?”

And he would say, “I’m Iranian by birth, and I’m American by choice, and I’m proud of both.”

In a world where we’ve been told those two cultures are incompatible with each other, the idea that you could hold these supposed conflicting identities simultaneously became a guiding principle for me.

In 2009 I moved to Iran, one of the least free countries in the world—the country where my late father was born.

I went there to work as a journalist. And I was pretty good at it. Good enough that I got one of the dream journalism jobs as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post.

This chapter will examine the writing of Rachel Cusk to further develop the possibility that there does not have to be a hero in a narrative, and the corresponding idea that one might not even be the hero of one's own narrative. Narrative, beyond its necessary involvement in her work as a writer, is a large thematic preoccupation within Cusk's writing. Her novels and essays are strewn with various meditations on the relationship between narrative and life, oftentimes in connection with a specific feeling that will be my focus in this chapter: an experience of intensity that simultaneously seems disconnected from any larger sense of narrative, paired with an awareness of this disconnection. It is not only her novels themselves that are aware of this feeling, but also the characters, who tend to remark upon it, whether in speech or internal monologues. Narrative and narration are thus vital problems for Cusk, and this feeling of disconnection is at play in many passages that describe experiences that can be deemed aesthetic due to their affective valence and their resonance with such experiences in the novels discussed in previous chapters.

The problem of narrative surfaces in various ways throughout Cusk's entire body of work. Beginning on the more recent end with her 2021 novel Second Place, we find such phrases as “the telling comes after the fact,” and “no story to life, no personal meaning beyond the meaning of any given moment.” Second Place is written as a series of letters addressed to “Jeffers”— the novel's stand-in for Robinson Jeffers, close friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose letters regarding her relationship with D. H. Lawrence in Lorenzo in Taos provide a rich and complex backdrop of inspiration for Cusk here—and the above phrases reveal a narrative voice aware of its attempts to make sense of events at the same time as it narrates them. Moving to one of her earlier and more conventional novels, The Temporary (1995), a mundane workplace exchange about the previous weekend yields the following: “She would ask him questions with apparently no memory of repetition or rebuff, retaining nevertheless the few blunt details he was obliged to divulge about his activities outside the office and stringing together a little narrative from them of which it pained Ralph to be the subject.”

Introduction

In 2021, Charlie Hebdo's press, Les Échappés, published Janvier 2015, Le Procès, a sober, well-documented book about the trial of the terrorist attacks on the journal that shook the world in 2015. The trial, which took place from 2 September to 16 December 2020, brought 14 people to the dock who were accused of having been accomplices to the terrorists (who themselves had died during the attacks), and gave survivors, family, police and hostages the chance to give a testimony of the events, often for the first time. Written by Yannick Haenel and illustrated by François Boucq – who had both joined the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo after 2015, and first published in daily instal-ments on the journal's website and in weekly dispatches in the journal – the book gives a subdued but detailed depiction of the proceedings, fulfilling the request of Charlie Hebdo's chief editor, Riss, to create a written monument for the victims of the attack.

Janvier 2015 is in many ways a unique work. Haenel's writing is precise and factual but its tone is mournful and engaging, and Boucq's sober illustrations in ink and watercolours beautifully evoke the atmosphere in the courtroom without being sentimental. As Cynthia Rose remarked in her review in The Comics Journal, the book's use of a combination of images and words to report on the trial also draws attention to a genre of graphic journalism in which the journal has been a pioneer, namely that of the graphic trial report. Graphic trial reports are non-fiction comics that report on trials. It is a minor genre of comics that flourished in the journal after it had come under the editorship of Philippe Val in 1992, and started to print ‘serious’ journalism and graphic non-fiction to accompany the editorial cartoons and humoristic pieces it is better known for. Charlie Hebdo published a large number of such graphic trial reports, dealing with various topics, ranging from the highly politicised trials of the National Front and Scientology to trials of corrupt businessmen, murderers and petty criminals. The length of these reports varies. Some are just a page long.

Why Study Law in Comics?

In this chapter, I will try to explain why the analysis of the representation of law provided by comics can be very useful in shedding light on some major themes of legal theory and constitutional law. In a seminal piece, Asimow emphasised the potential of pop culture when teaching law courses:

There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to this exercise that also apply to the use of comics. On the one hand, students will certainly be aided in their understanding of legal dynamics by the use of comic book stories and characters. The use of comics will also reduce the existing gap in knowledge between professors and students, in the sense that students will be able to start from a knowledge of the stories that will facilitate interaction. On the other hand, the vision that comics offer of law is certainly simplified or, rather, presents the same clichés that ordinary people have of law. As a law professor, I have to say that my students have generally always been more fascinated by outlaws than by the guardians of legality. Make no mistake, though, here the notion of outlaw does not necessarily include only villains, but also many of what we would call superheroes. This is also explained by the fact that the world in which these actors operate is often based on corrupt power dynamics. In this chapter, I will try to show the usefulness of comics-based legal research in investigating the pathological side of law, with particular reference to two phenomena: the insufficiency of law in the fight for justice and the use of laws as instruments for creating discrimination. These are obviously only two examples among many possible ones. In this sense, the chapter makes no claim to exhaustiveness.

This book explores how comics, animated series and pop music represent law, reflecting and shaping public perception. It adopts a comparative and international law approach, involving diverse scholars and going beyond Anglo-American culture to enrich the legal debate. This innovative collection fills a crucial gap in both legal and cultural studies.

While there is an established tradition in this field within Anglo-Saxon academic contexts, in continental Europe, works like those included in this volume remain relatively rare.

This book is the product of a long journey that began before the pandemic and continued with virtual and in-person seminars that allowed us to gather a group of scholars interested in how the relationship between law and justice is represented in comics and other pop culture products.

Over recent years, we have been organising an annual event that explores the intersection of law and pop culture. These events are primarily aimed at an academic audience but remain open to others. They bring together lawyers and non-lawyers – such as media sociologists and political philosophers – to examine the relationship between law and morality within various fictional worlds. The inaugural sessions featured Batman and Daredevil as focal points.

Inspired by the positive reception and media interest these events generated, the STALS research group (Sant’Anna Legal Studies) hosted an online event titled Law, Justice, and Pop Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. This full-day event, which can be viewed on the STALS YouTube channel, brought together diverse perspectives on the topic. Building on this momentum, we proposed to the Italian Society of Comparative and European Public Law (Diritto pubblico comparato ed europeo) that its annual conference, held in the Department of Law of the University of Foggia, should focus on the representation of legal traditions in pop culture. The call for papers, issued in Italian, attracted significant interest and culminated in a nearly 800-page volume edited by us, Aldo Ligustro and Rolando Tarchi.

Encouraged by the success of these initiatives, our STALS team – together with Paolo Addis and Luca Gori – decided to extend this project to high schools. We organised a series of lectures in Lucca, home to the renowned Lucca Comics & Games festival, Europe's largest comic and gaming convention. This initiative was carried out in partnership with the Centro Maria Eletta Martini, Fondazione per la Coesione Sociale Onlus and Lucca Crea.

Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu has been the subject of countless scholarly studies. It has even made its way into everyday life, with film adaptations and endless references in popular culture. Two notable examples of this come to mind from the Anglophone world: the evocation of a certain “Proustian memory” when talking about sense memories, and Starbucks brand madeleine cookies. Thomas Baldwin has referred to this phenomenon as “the Proust brand.”1 In coining this phrase, Baldwin points out that such references, while they easily proliferate through society, merely graze the surface of Proust's text in a superficial way; they are branding. Sense memories are not something that Proust single-handedly invented, nor are madeleines. Yet, both examples are linked to the question of Proust's aesthetics, meaning not only the style of his writing, but more importantly the way that aesthetic experience is deployed throughout the novel. In short, the Proust brand is shorthand for the most obvious and identifiable aspects of the Recherche, insofar as these aspects and references tend to be identified with the novel, influencing the way that we recognize its instances of aesthetic experience, as well as what we understand as its contribution to the theory of aesthetic experience. And this Proust brand is not limited to popular culture, but has also affected the way that his work is studied.

To be sure, involuntary memory has a key place in the novel, but the situation is far more complicated than any particular example or structure can convey, not least because involuntary memory also occasions the novel's major and most well-known theoretical passages. These passages have often served for critics as the hermeneutic key to the work itself, and it is not hard to see why. But at the same time, these passages, which are prompted by instances of involuntary memory, also incite theorizations of involuntary memory itself, as well as prefacing the narrator's exposition of his “aesthetic theory.” The madeleine scene from early in the novel, for one, is preceded by a short comment laying out the narrator's unique understanding of the relationship between object and impression. And later, in the very portion of the novel where the narrator's aesthetic theory is revealed, his digression about this theory is prompted by a series of involuntary memories, one after the other.

Jaspers was not a sociologist, but he had—especially through his concept of the Axial Age (Achsenzeit)—a powerful influence on sociology. The Axial Age became a specifically cultural and macrosociological subject. No other discipline was as stimulated by Jaspers's concept of the Axial Age as sociology. No other book by Jaspers, and perhaps no other philosophical work of the era, has exerted such a strong influence on this discipline with regard to its historical orientation.

History of the Concept

The concept of the Axial Age (Achsenzeit) in Jaspers's thought dates back to the late 1930s. He apparently developed it in the course of his study of Chinese and Indian philosophy. As early as March 1938, he wrote to Indologist Heinrich Zimmer of his “envisioning of philosophy through a universal-historical lens,” noting that it was “as if one were standing before the gates of an extraordinary insight—but couldn't quite manage to push the gate open.”

This insight can only refer to the phenomenon for which he was soon to coin the term “Achsenzeit,” an attempt to convey the thesis of the approximate simultaneity of intellectual movements between 800 and 200 bc in East and West. However, Jaspers's colleague, cultural sociologist Alfred Weber (an avowed opponent of the Nazi regime, who, like Jaspers, had to give up his teaching activities and embark upon “inner emigration”) had already tackled the same issue some years earlier. In his 1935 book Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie, he referred to a “synchronistic global age” (“synchronistisches Weltzeitalter”) that he attributed to the overlaying of the West by the equestrian peoples of the East. Jaspers and Weber were in close contact. Weber's project and thus this theme could not possibly have escaped him. Jaspers's “extraordinary insight” did not, therefore, consist in the insight per se, but in the philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon at issue—which Weber interpreted quite differently. In Jaspers's text “Wende der Universalgeschichte” (Turn of universal history), presumably written in 1941 for a publication in Japan, the term and the concept “Axial Age” are already present; these ten pages to some extent correspond, partly verbatim, to pages 19–25 of Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History).

Describing the contours of aesthetic experience is no easy matter. In itself, it is a fairly simple phenomenon: we experience the world around us without reference to the cognitive, the moral, and the practical, at least in Kant's version. But actually detaching ourselves from these concerns and entering a disinterested state is where the difficulty comes in. A certain strain of thinking imagines that we can achieve disinterest, or at least be more prepared for it, through cultivation and various forms of aesthetic education. And this may be true—contemplating nature and reflecting on works of art surely have benefits for our ability to recognize the various modalities of experience. But as I’ve argued throughout this book, the dimension of chance goes unnoticed when we conceive of aesthetic experience as a voluntary, intentional situation. And, as it turns out, chance is one of the most difficult forces to recognize, articulate, and grapple with, whether experientially or analytically.

The four moments of aesthetic experience as I’ve laid them out here are an attempt to foreground the importance of chance in this conversation. Both positive and negative moments are necessary due to the complexity of chance, which demands to be interpreted in a dialectical fashion. It is not enough to thematize chance—as we see with Balzac's La Peau de chagrin—for chance to really be understood and made present, whether in a narrative or in life.