I could have chosen to close this book with a happy ending involving humankind's glorious lift-off into space, after having defeated the Great Filters of all kinds. But the pages of this existential-spatial journey would not be complete without confronting one final question: so what? Will a departure from Earth enable humanity to reach our goal, if indeed we have one? Will it provide answers to our deepest questions and darkest fears? Will it bring us any closer to the truth about who we really are, why we exist, and what awaits us in the great beyond?

When I talk about this idea of traveling to another Earth, I am faced with three different types of reactions, vibrating like three electrical poles of the human psyche: the neutral, the negative and the positive. Those to whom I have spoken will, I trust, forgive me for caricaturing them a bit. Those in the neutral camp look at me with surprise, but with no real sparkle in their eye. They are indifferent to questions about the technological feasibility of such a journey, for they simply cannot see the point. They may have loved Star Wars, but feel nothing when watching Interstellar. For them, life is here and now, and the question of humankind's destiny does not extend beyond the life of their children's children. They believe that humans will disappear anyway well before they can travel to another star system. Those in the negative camp fix me with an inquisitive glare: God did not create man for him to reach the heavens through any other vehicle but prayer—we were made to cultivate the land with sweat dripping from our brows, suffer great pain in childbirth and follow His commandments. For them, we are destined for tragedy, and leaving Earth is more likely to destroy us than to save us, as if we were climbing the Tower of Babel itself. Of course, they don't put it like that, but it is from this unconscious conformist source that they draw their instinctive disapproval, even though some may be ardent atheists (the legitimation of any existing order being to my view a psychological trait that is not necessarily rooted in religious dogma).

Given that magazines – in particular popular or mass-market magazines – are spaces in which literary, ideological, and commercial interests intersect, a methodology which accounts for these diverse interests is crucial. Literary scholars analysing magazines have tended to privilege written above visual content, as well as prioritising editorial above commercial material. Like many periodical studies scholars, I argue that the magazine is a collaborative, multiauthored text and is therefore best interrogated through an interdisciplinary approach which challenges hierarchical value-based assumptions. This work aligns its approach with that of Faye Hammill, Paul Hjartarson and Hannah McGregor, who seek to maintain

In this chapter, I will explore my own commitment to reading the Ladies’ Home Journal and Canadian Home Journal using a combination of formal and contextual analysis. This requires a synthesis of approaches drawn from different disciplines, outlined in what follows. The chapter has two main aims: first, to establish the critical framework for the detailed analysis that follows in Chapters 2–4; and second, to contribute to current methodological debate in the field of periodical studies. While this study takes two specific women's magazines as its central focus, its methodological approach is applicable far beyond these titles and national contexts. This chapter provides the theoretical and methodological foundation for the chapters that follow, but also highlights some of the ways that this approach may be useful for future research. Beginning with contextual discussions of mass and popular culture, women's mass-market magazines, and serial print media, this chapter will question the terms used to describe these magazines, the print cultures they entered into and became an integral part of, and the existing scholarship which provides a basis for understanding them. It will then detail the methodological approaches which will allow for the comparative consideration of these magazines as collaborative literary texts, cultural artefacts and commercial products.

Until this book, studies that examined the impact of the Sentencia focused primarily on the experiences of persons already living at the fringes of citizenship. Namely, undocumented stateless populations – often children – born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian migrants who, because they had no birth certificate, could not access their Dominican nationality. In this chapter, we will expand this approach further to consider the experiences of people the anthropologist Samuel Martínez refers to as the ‘un-Dominicans’. These are individuals who exist in law as citizens yet have faced overwhelmingly convoluted bureaucratic and administrative obstacles when attempting to acquire state-issued paperwork.

To provoke debate and encourage new modes of thinking about the Dominican case, I argued in Chapter 2 for the need to dehaitianise our approaches to the Sentencia. This, I maintain, is to help us understand how citizenship-stripping practices, while motivated by anti-Haitianism, form part of a broader destabilising process (Aber and Small, 2013) which is experienced across the body politic in different and sometimes contradictory ways. While the actions of the Dominican state have been indisputably and unforgivably discriminatory towards persons of Haitian ancestry, in this chapter we will also consider the ways in which efforts to provide all Dominicans with their legal identity through the issuance of the new biometric ID card have affected Black Dominicans of no immediate foreign ancestry, Black Dominicans of Anglo-Caribbean descent (cocolos), and other Dominicans of non-Haitian ancestry, including two women I interviewed for this chapter who were born to Japanese and Argentinean parents.

This approach moves in line with the sociologist Tonkiss and the political theorist Bloom who support the need to interpret noncitizenship beyond a legalistic and rights-based lens to instead see it as a ‘heterogeneous and complex’ construct experienced empirically in a variety of ways (2015, p. 844). For the purposes of this book, I interpret these as an ‘assemblage’ of measures (Goldring and Landolt, 2013) that can cast doubt and uncertainty over how citizens access their legal identity and the demands placed upon them to evidence their right to belong.

The Dominican Republic is the leading country of origin of unauthorised migrants from the Caribbean. Close to 2 million Dominicans – approximately one-fifth of the entire population – and their descendants are now thought to live in the United States. This constitutes the fifth largest Latino group in the United States with most migrants settling in New York or Miami. While a limited number of Dominicans and Haitians arrive via boat under highly perilous circumstances, the majority land in the United States with a commercial airline having acquired a passport and tourist visa. A proportion of these migrants eventually become illegal over-stayers when their documents expire and they are then forced to remain – undetected – in the country.

Until recently, the undocumented status of Dominicans living overseas meant that many were hesitant or unable to renew their passport. This made it impossible for thousands of Dominicans to resolve their irregular status with the US authorities. The overhaul of the country's social policy sector, the expansion of new digital technologies and the modernisation of the civil registry have ensured that transnational Dominican populations can now access their legal identity documentation from anywhere in the world with diplomatic representation. As migrants, they no longer have to make the long and expensive journey back to their place of birth to acquire their documents. These changes have transformed the lives of millions of Dominicans and their descendants living overseas as they can now obtain their national identity card, renew their passport and vote without ever having to step foot on the island.

One woman I interviewed for this book gave a chilling account of the dangers Dominicans and Haitians face if they decide to leave in search of a better life. Born in the Bay of Samaná, a coastal town in the north-east of the country, she recounted that as a child she was regularly awoken in the middle of the night by the screams of people drowning in the ocean desperate to get to Puerto Rico by boat.

On October 7, 2001, US jets’ month-long bombing of Afghanistan prompted al-Qaida to send some of its Arab fighters for hiding in Tora Bora, a beige mountain range with sparse villages on the Afghan side of a corridor abutting Pakistan's ex-FATA. The US assault on Afghanistan, called “Operation Anaconda,” triggered the longest overt war in American history. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) strategists were guiding around 12,000 US troops focused on FATA. On the Pakistan side, General Musharraf has aided the United States to launch the “al-Meezan-1” and its sequel “al-Meezan-2” operations in ex-FATA. Over seventy-four thousand Pakistani troops were gradually transported to set up over six hundred checkpoints for blocking al-Qaida's penetration. Against this backdrop, this chapter examines an economy of labor relations of news production at work during this US attack on Afghanistan. It reveals how the term “fixer” obscures hierarchies of power relations, trivializing the risks taken and violence endured by local laboring journalists on their very bodies and professional integrity.

With the start of the war, foreign media personnel began to leave Peshawar. Some left for Afghanistan, a few stayed behind, and the remaining journalists moved to the federal capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, a smooth two-hour drive to the east of Peshawar. As terrorism's center of gravity expanded from Afghanistan to Pakistan, district reporters emerged as a prime source of critically necessary information. The Bureau reporters, in the shifting territory of the conflict, got limited work; most of them served as information facilitators, an intermediary source between foreign journalists and district reporters. Elite global wire services—that is, Agency France Presse (AFP), Reuters, and Associated Press (AP)—and top global news sources—that is, CNBC, the New York Times (NYT), NHK, Al Jazeera and CNN—had their offices established in Islamabad, some of them worked there since the 1980s’ Afghan war. As the district reporters accessed these media outlets mostly through bureau reporters, the emerging division of labor promoted competition, enabling the global media outlets to obtain news from ex-FATA's inaccessible caves and corners called the “information black hole.”

“Get ready, we are on the way,” the American journalist said to his Pakistani counterpart in Peshawar before hanging up the phone. Aimal Khan, a research participant in this study, received this call a few hours after the 9/11 attacks. American journalists were sure that the United States had planned to seek revenge on the Afghan Taliban for providing shelter to Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader whom the United States held responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Two weeks before the actual war, over four hundred international journalists thronged Pakistan, an estimate collected from a survey of hotels in Peshawar, Islamabad and Quetta. Peshawar city offered a view of a makeshift strategic base for the global media from where the bulk of the visiting journalists not just contextualized the imminent war in Afghanistan, but they also hired local reporters to work for them as “fixers.” Fixer” became a natural ‘logistical” position for local reporters to occupy. They jumped into the role offered to them to become a local helping “hand” to facilitate the visitors. This media circus started in the second week of September and continued until October 7, 2001, when the United States and its NATO allies launched an attack on Afghanistan.

With a focus on the pre-attack phase, I examine in this chapter how the local Pashtun reporter understood the term “fixer” and adapted to the challenges of this role. The “fixers” interviewed in this chapter mostly worked with global news networks belonging to Western countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Germany. A few worked for Qatar-, Japan-and Turkey-based channels. Because of the book's focus on the local journalists’ field experiences, this chapter neither examines the nature of foreign journalists’ identities or global media organizational divisions, differences and competitions, nor systematically probes into the coverage of these identities, networks or associations. I aim to critically focus on local journalists’ newly carved identity/role of “fixer.”

In this chapter I argue that the term “fixer” represents a particular class of knowledge workers, who are being de-skilled and de-professionalized—deprived of trade recognition including credit/awards/compensation for their editorial contributions.

Bureaucracies were central to settler colonies, upholding the interests of dominant groups while systematically excluding native-born populations from economic, political and social power (Parker, 2015) in the Americas. Settlers implemented numerous attempts to control Black and Indigenous bodies through the use of legal restrictions, registrations, vagrancy laws (Fisher and O’Hara, 2009), and the process of blanqueamiento, a means of social whitening which attempted to ‘improve’ the race of Latin Americans. Linked to ideas of modernity in post-colonial nations (Wade, 1993), blanqueamiento forged a Eurocentric identity via the creation of elaborate racial categorisation mechanisms that favoured whites and foreigners over Indigenous and Afro-descended groups, the income-poor and women.

The island of Hispaniola, shared between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was pivotal to the bureaucratic and economic expansion of the Americas (Gómez Nadal, 2017). Since the colonial era, the island has been closely connected to globalisation and the movement of peoples (Mintz, 1966, pp. 289–331; Chamberlain, 1998, p. 1). It long ‘predate[d] the modern’ (Mintz and Price, 1985; Howard, 2017), playing an important role in the world economy and capitalist expansion. Plantation-based labour was the driving force of this colonial project which forcibly and brutally removed hundreds of thousands of people from West Africa to exploit under slavery.

White colonialism demanded Black conformity to this world system, preventing any form of agency in an attempt to destroy the Black man's sense of self (Fanon, 1952). In the West, French colonial powers profited handsomely from sugar plantation agriculture imposed in Haiti in the eighteenth century while subjecting slaves to rape, torture and extreme physical and psychological exhaustion.

Emerging from this brutal and repressive environment, the slaves fought back. A pivotal event in world history, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) represented an ‘upside-down world’ (San Miguel, 2005, p. 22) in which African slaves disrupted the global order by fighting and ultimately ousting the European colonisers occupying the island. Significantly, the Haitian Revolution resulted in the formation of the first free Black republic.