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This chapter argues that expression is not merely a matter of representing one's thoughts to the world, for the enterprise of expressing oneself is as much about creation as it is about representation. Mediums of expression do not simply convey a person's thoughts to the world; they do a great deal to shape the content of those thoughts. It follows that freedom of expression is not simply the freedom to communicate one's voice to others, but is more fundamentally the freedom to develop a distinctive voice of one's own. The recognition of this fact has significant practical implications, for it moves the arts and other creative forms of expression from the margins of freedom of expression, where they have languished in standard accounts of that freedom, to its core.

Chapter one explores ballet’s history of cohabitation with state power, and shows how Guinea’s socialist state demanded loyalty, but also depended on the sincerity and spontaneity of artists’ performances to win the hearts and minds of spectators. This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding the connection between aesthetics, magic, and politics in Guinea, and complicates any simple dichotomy between authoritarianism and creative freedom. Performing artists in socialist Guinea navigated a contradiction at the heart of all modernizing projects: that ideals of creativity and reason are in tension with the political authority of the modern state. How they chose to engage that tension exemplifies broader negotiations between creativity and authority that have had ramifying consequences in Guinean society into the present.

While not itself the subject of a controversy, Nadeem Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers, the focus of Chapter 5, thematises and explores the politics of minority offence and the binary of individual freedom versus cultural censure and censorship that has framed responses to controversies surrounding artistic representations of Islam and Muslims. In tracing the presence and complication of this binary in Maps for Lost Lovers, the chapter explores how far the novel gets beyond the gendered culturalist discourses that have underpinned pronouncements on the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism from both left and right. It argues that despite contextualising the oppressors’ behaviour within their own disempowerment in Britain, the novel appears to present just two alternative positions: individual withdrawal and dissent from community, culture and faith, or complicity with the community’s oppressive practices whose victims are primarily its women and children. The potential for a positive communitarianism formed around religious culture is constantly deflected or stymied, often through a focus on the abuse of women, so that a thoroughgoing multiculturalism predicated on a ‘politics of recognition’ and a commitment to gender equality are held in tension.

This chapter begins with the discussion of the birth of the Films Division as Nehru’s brainchild and the hope Indian filmmakers placed in the power of the documentary medium to contribute to the project of development on the brink of Independence. It shows that in spite of what appeared to be a denunciation of colonial filmmaking by leaders of post-Independence India, the Films Division adopted production and distribution policies similar to those introduced by the British, including a compulsory exhibition scheme and an assembly-like production pipeline that suppressed the creative input of individual artists. A section on internal tensions brings out evidence from diaries, personal collections and FD record rooms proving that despite these strong continuities, FD was a “melting pot” of ideas about filmmaking and development as early as the 1950s. A separate discussion of FD’s Cartoon Film Unit is included, analyzing the role of animation in government film. The chapter concludes with an extensively researched compilation of views on FD expressed by Indian film critics and political commentators from the late 1940s up until the Emergency. These voices echo the book’s argument about colonial-postcolonial continuity while also hinting at the heterogeneity of voices within FD.

This chapter describes the relationship between Hitchcock and Jack L. Warner. Warner Bros. had agreed to serve as a distributor for pictures made by Transatlantic films with the proviso that Hitchcock direct one Warner’s film for each Transatlantic film. When Transatlantic floundered, Jack L. Warner restructured the deal so that Hitchcock would direct four films for Warner Bros., receiving $3,000 a week as his own producer and points on those films that turned a profit. The deal worked out well for Hitchcock, earning him roughly $250,000 per film, a considerable increase over the $50,000 Selznick had paid him for Rebecca and making him one of the best-paid directors in Hollywood. Subsequent chapters discuss the impacts of censorship on each of the four films Hitchcock made for Warner Bros.

The early days of social media saw tremendous optimism about the transformations that connecting people via networked computers would bring. This chapter, the book’s epilogue, analyses the nostalgia that permeates the preceding chapters, in which the pioneers of the field write with nostalgia for creative freedom, the pre-commercial internet and the hopeful time when people believed that computing would change humanity for the better. The world of dial-up modems and floppy disks and ASCII bulletin board systems seems very long ago. But the ideals of that time, in spite of their naiveté, indeed because of it, are very valuable. Untainted by cynicism or corrupted by practicalities, they remind us of what the social net ought to be; they remind of the direction to head in, even if we will not quite get there. By inculcating ideals into mythic origin stories, nostalgia weaves them into a culture: we create the past that we want to live up to.