This chapter examines the ‘peculiar’ utopian temporality of the contemporary moment as expressed in the fictional works of three Black British female writers: Queenie (2019), by Candace Carty-Williams, Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith, and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernadine Evaristo. The chapter argues that these novels represent a particular incarnation of utopian realism. This names a strong commitment in contemporary British fiction to articulating post-racial futures. In utopian realist texts, writers use realism not to convey mimetic depictions of the present here and now but, rather, to convince readers of the viability of alternative, transformed futures. Utopian realists such as Candace Carty-Williams, Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Monica Ali, and Diana Evans foreground a relationship between utopian thinking and models drawn from personal and historic experience. Like design fictions, the term given for fictional narratives used by designers of prototype products and technologies to help imagine their future use, these texts offer readers identifiable utopian alternatives to contemporary Britain. Shaped in relation to the long history of Black experience in the United Kingdom, as well as gender and queerness, these novels reveal the need to consider the future not as a speculative possibility but a realisable plan for how we might live.

The conclusion draws together the themes of the chapters, returning to the analogy between marriage and anthropology as encounters with difference. Weaving together the stories of two protagonists encountered in the Introduction with the themes of ethical imagination and temporality, it draws out the broader significance of the everyday labour of moral imagination in kinship relations, and of marriage as a crucible of long-term social transformation. The discussion reflects on the importance of attending anthropologically to seemingly insignificant, everyday, domestic encounters and judgements, and to their cumulative effects.

This chapter looks at forms of uncertainty that occur at different stages of married life. A central question here is what does uncertainty produce? The chapter focuses partly on Malay protagonists and on two particularly fragile moments in Malay marriage: during betrothal and, counterintuitively, much later on, after several decades, when one might expect marriages to be highly stable. The former was a pattern familiar from earlier research. But some older Malay women spoke of a more recent trend – for husbands of many years to marry a younger woman polygamously. Meanwhile, other, non-Malay, couples have adopted unconventional living arrangements or have taken unusual paths to suit their particular circumstances. In considering how different kinds of marital uncertainty play out, the significance of expectations about marriage and the registers of temporality through which they are calibrated and recalibrated are illuminated. The force of unanticipated events stimulates the reflection of protagonists and their consociates – as readers may recognise from their own experiences – reformulating ideas of what is appropriate or acceptable behaviour, and precipitating new ethical stances.

In the conclusion, we weave together the themes of the volume. We trace three historically overlapping configurations corruption and colonialism, corruption and modernity, and neoliberalism and anti-corruptionism and suggest that we may be entering into a one (a fourth one) characterized by illiberalism. Additionally, we propose “deep analogies” that cross-cut the configurations, including corruption’s inevitable intertwining with power, institutional sedimentation, and processes of evaluation.

The arguments of the book are laid out, beginning with questions that probe the apparent obviousness of marriage as an institution. What does marriage do? How can we account for both its historical persistence and its cultural and historical variability as an institution? Rather than see it as an essentially conservative and normative institution, this book argues that marriage is, on the contrary, a crucible of transformation – of personal, familial and wider political relations. This is partly a result of the unique position it holds as an intimate relation but also a political, legal and religious one. The conventionality of marriage provides a deceptive cloak of conformity masking the elasticity of what may be acceptable to spouses, families and communities. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of marriage in contemporary Penang but draws on a range of comparative materials from anthropology, literature, films and other sources. The main themes of the book are introduced: marriage as continuity of patterns in earlier generations and, simultaneously, as divergence from these; an overview of the anthropology of marriage and its lacunae; marriage as ethical labour in and on time; and marriage as an everyday work of moral imagination. The chapters are outlined.

The substantive discussion begun in Chapter 2, particularly on interpretation, is continued in Chapter 3 through the prism of progress. Collective understandings of state violence, including torture, are understood to have changed over time, with what was historically conceived as permissible coming to be condemned as reprehensible. Changing understandings of pain and punishment, it is argued, are sociopolitically contingent, with legal assessments of torture too beholden to this broader context. On this register, the chapter charts the broader contours of the central shifts in prevailing social and scientific views, values and knowledge, as channelled or challenged through judges and taken to constitute torture’s sociality. This has culminated, it is argued, in a script of ‘progress’ driving the anti-torture field.

Chapter 4, on David Jones’ The Anathemata (1952), considers the poem in terms of the author’s own aspiration to preserve the past. Jones considers art to be a way of making its object present and active, as the Roman Catholic Mass is believed to make Christ’s body and blood present. This form of “re-presentation” (anamnēsis) makes the past actively present without literally reconstructing it, offering a middle way between Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia. In Jones’ view, poets in the twentieth century must assemble the fragments of the cultural past as a means of resisting the increasingly utilitarian nature of modern culture. Ultimately, Jones’ densely allusive poetry forces us to consider the limits of nostalgia. If art inevitably makes past present, is it always in some sense nostalgic?

Chapter 6 makes it clear that definitions, categories and expertise have not ended interpretive issues. Definitions are disembodied. All forms of violence and suffering, their definition and recognition remain relational in reality, born out of a labyrinthine complexity – in terms of how they are constructed, communicated, filtered and understood. Preconceptions of who is deserving of recognition, the requisites for social identification, moral commitment or collective empathy reveal this to be the case. Social science takes suffering to be (inescapably) intersubjectively, textually and sensorially understood – so judicial determinations must also go beyond the technical and doctrinal. The chapter’s discussion on temporality continues the theme of sensing. It examines temporal registers in the recognition of torture – exploring the questions: how does time feature and function in juridical understandings of torture? This discussion on time adds to the kaleidoscopic catalogue of sense-centric registers and reasoning operating in the anti-torture field – illustrating it to be a device of inclusion and exclusion.

Chapter 6 provides an analysis of the impact of diasporic state-building and its legacy for Iraq, asking what kind of state the diaspora helped to build. Analysing the effects of elite and civil society mobilisation shows how the legacy of diasporic state-building is still felt today and how it has shaped the relationship between state and society in significant ways. This chapter also briefly explores differences in diasporic mobilisation for state-building over time between the United Kingdom and Sweden. With each political period during Iraq’s nascent democracy, opportunities shifted and were reinforced by homeland political dynamics. Charting diasporic state-building over time underscores the patterns and trends that have emerged within the diasporic transnational field to reveal the hegemonic identities, actors, and movements being shaped between Iraq and the diaspora. This two-way transnational flow not only creates attachments, allegiances and loyalties but also has significant implications for the future of the Iraqi state and the Iraqi nation. Finally, the chapter briefly explores the transnationalism of second-generation Iraqis and their commitment to Iraq. It investigates the effects of events in Iraq on their identities and senses of belonging, as well as political transnationalism towards the country.

Buildings frequently change over their lifespans as they are adapted to new needs and affected by damage and decay, yet our approaches to architectural history often fail to account for the material and cultural effects of interventions on existing structures or to pursue the critical questions they raise about temporality and urban environments. The book’s Introduction orients readers to diachronic approaches to architectural history, that is, beyond the moment of initial construction, oriented to the perspective of historical actors. In recognizing moments of architectural revision and rebuilding as inflection points, it stresses the importance of accounting for architectural fabrics composed of variously dated elements and of examining the ways that architectural change shapes audience perception of the site’s history and their own era’s relationship to it. Close examination of two exceptionally long-lasting structures, the Pantheon in Rome and the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofia in Constantinople/Istanbul present a compelling contrast to most modern forms of architectural restoration and illustrate central themes of the book. The chapter situates study of historical architecture within current approaches to cultural time and to material culture and places architectural change in dialogue with text-based approaches to Roman temporality.

Rather than view nineteenth-century Australian poetry as simply imitative of British models, this chapter examines how such poetry explored aspects of time and space in distinctive ways as well as from alternative perspectives. It considers how Charles Harpur conceptualised shifts in temporal scale, how Caroline Leakey questioned positioning and precedence, and how Eliza Dunlop engaged with the idea of distance that extended to aspects of the human condition more generally. It also analyses how writers such as Mary Bailey, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall and R. H. Horne (who lived in Australia for a substantial period) reconfigured classical and English literary traditions through antipodal positions that raised questions around heritage and history. The chapter then discusses women’s navigation of delimiting conventions of authorship. Lastly, the chapter considers how nineteenth-century Australian poetry started to voice nation in an embryonic form.

Chapter 4 brings together the works of French poet and lyricist Guillaume de Machaut with those of bilingual English poet John Gower, as well as some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s lyrics. These authors take part in the ‘intellectualisation’ of love poetry that sees the language of phantasmatic love’s joy be confronted with that of Boethian happiness and sufficiency. This confrontation, I argue, demonstrates the incompatibility of love’s joy with happiness: the latter is a form of self-mastery whereas the former fragments the subject in self-delusion. This chapter also traces the transmission of the French language of joie d’amour into Middle English and its relationship with the native blisse, which I show to be at the convergence between philosophical, mystical and erotic languages of love. While Gower foregoes the native blisse, Chaucer’s lyrics bring the languages of joie and bliss together to build a new form of love’s joy as the consummation of desire and an escape from earthly temporality.

This book explores Herodotus’ creative interaction with the Greek poetic tradition from early hexameter verse through fifth-century Attic tragedy. The poetic tradition informs the Histories in both positive and negative ways, since Herodotus adopts or adapts some poetic features while rejecting others as a means of defining the nature of his own project. The range of such features includes subject matter; diction and phraseology; narrative motifs, themes, patterns, and structure; speech types and speech complexes; the role of the narrator – his presence, functions, source(s), authority, and limitations; the manipulation of time (narrative order, rhythm, and frequency); conceptions of truth and falsehood; the construction of the human past and its relation to the present; the relationship between humanity and deity, and the role each plays in the causation of events. In these and other regards Herodotus may use poetic precedent as a model, a foil, or some combination of the two.

This concluding chapter reflects on the relationship between transitional justice, power, and law at the current global conjuncture of the alleged end or “eclipse” of liberal democracy and human rights and the rise of rightwing authoritarian populism and fascism. It recapitulates the major interventions of the book that critically interrogate the binary of liberalism and authoritarianism and the abstract idealization of the virtues of transparency and the right to know in dominant transitional justice and human rights politics. The chapter organizes the concluding reflections under five headings that draw attention to the making of rightwing authoritarian populist legalism and transitional justice; the problem of Eurocentrism; capitalist and nation-state-centric politics of transitional justice; and reflections on the alternative notions of truth and political responsibility that the book has developed as part of its attempt to envision socially transformative justice beyond moral autopsy and heated political struggles.