The ‘novel of the future’ speculates on the ‘temporal’ utopia/dystopia. Its strange fate in modern China reveals much about the relationship between imagination, ideology and modernity in the Chinese mindset. Prior to the concept of modernity being imported into China there had been no fiction about the future. For, in traditional China, history did not have directionality. Two powerful Western ideologies, both ‘progressive’, took turns to dominate modern China. Social Darwinism led to the great explosion of the novel of the future in the early twentieth century. From the 1920s onwards, with Marxism becoming the dominant ideology, the novel of the future disappeared completely: when the future was predetermined, no speculation was to be tolerated. In the 1990s, there erupted another spectacular flourishing of novels of future in China, although these works are pessimistic in tone, as belief in the future has been thrown into serious doubt.

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.

The applicability of Western concepts to an understanding of gender in other cultural settings has become increasingly problematic. We need to elicit an understanding of how particular societies define sexual difference, and derive locally grounded ideas of self and the materiality of the body as a starting point for analysis. This paper examines some of the wider implications of this view for notions of cultural context and comparison. Its ethnographic examples come from Latin America. They build on the regional interest in spiritual and symbolic forms as ‘scripts’ for gender identifications, exploring the diverse ways in which idealizations, images and icons are read in ways that encompass both ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ narratives. However, the discussion aims to be relevant beyond this geographical location, suggesting that both secular and sacred discourses appear to work at a number of different, sometimes contradictory, levels, often drawing together transcultural notions of being, and generating a field of meaning in which gender, value and morality are constituted.