Here, the book pauses for a brief interlude. Throughout the book I have made the case that ableist practice of reading bodies for meaning is a reflex of coloniality as well as of classicism. But the narrativizing of blindness as a kind of special knowledge and as a kind of ignorance (explored in the previous chapter) is so frequent in colonial writing as to have been adopted (and explicitly subverted) in anti-colonial and decolonial writing. And here we pause to examine some examples of this, including in the plays of Edgar Nkosi White, Ola Rotimi (and Otun Rasheed), Rita Dove, Danai Gurira and Katori Hall. This leads to a discussion of empire’s specific visuality, drawing on the human zoo and the colonial gaze it shared with the European imperialism and the imperial theatre. The chapter concludes with further investigation of the problem of time (which recurs throughout the book), drawing in more detail on some of Deleuze’s formulations of temporality.

Chapter Five attempts to draw out some strategies of visual activism, or resistant spectatorship from the figure of the blind character. Leaning on analyses of staring in disability studies and Black feminist philosophy, it argues that looking back is not only a retrospective gaze but also an activist one. Plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Peter Rose, John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Henry Chettle and John Day, and others are at the core of this chapter, as well as other paratexts for discourses on the ethics of spectating (including, for instance, Judith Butler and Susan Sontag’s writing on the ethics of looking at photographs of torture). The chapter concludes that spectatorship needs to divest itself of a view-from-nowhere model and move towards a situated view-from-somewhere model, that emphasises its partiality and its accountability.

Chapter Three begins with a reading of Everyman, and deals with the persistent narrative use of disability as a kind of metaphorical death. This is not just the case in medieval or early modern drama, but persists in the present day where it is still evident in the dangerous (and deadly) ideological fantasy that insists that disabled people’s lives are less worth living than those of enabled people. As well as examining this trope in texts like Seneca’s Oedipus, and through characters such as Lamech in biblically-inspired drama, this chapter also begins to address some of the problems of the model of a classical tradition as a way of figuring reception. The chapter closes with some thoughts on the relationship between this eugenicist conflating of disability and closeness to death, and gender.

Chapter Two addresses the first example of a metaphorical use of blindness: the idea that blindness is a kind of punishment (and results from immoral behaviour). In particular, the chapter focuses on a particularly dangerous category of this trope that persists into the present day – the idea that blind people (and blind characters) are immoral because they are pretending to be blind. Ancient examples in this chapter are Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides’ Hecuba and Cyclops (these ancient texts recur in almost every chapter). Modern texts under examination here include Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 2, and King Lear, French medieval drama (especially farce) and the anonymous Historie of Jacob and Esau. As well as introducing this metaphorical use of blindness, this chapter also delves further into the question of temporality and origin-positioning.

In Chapter Four we look at what is perhaps the most frequent metaphorical use of blindness: to stand for insight, second sight, or prophecy. The chapter situates this within what is known in disability studies as the ‘supercrip trope’, and looks in particular at the theatre’s special interest in Tiresias as key to the perpetuation of this trope. The plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Brian Friel, Samuel Beckett and John Milton are discussed in this chapter, among others. Finally, the chapter compares the theatre’s (and theatrical spectators’ special implication in this trope with more liberatory ways of figuring blindness in speculative fiction (drawing on the work of Sami Schalk).

Chapter One makes the case for a new way of seeing. Leaning on bell hooks and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s advocacy for an activist type of looking, it sets up some ways we might begin to read against – rather than with – the dominant narratives about disability. This chapter makes the first in a series of connections between classicism and coloniality that will recur in this book, and sees the process of reading bodies for meaning as rooted in colonial eugenics as well as classically-inspired physiognomy. Crucially for the argument of the book, the chapter concludes that reading bodies for meaning is neither a wholly classical nor a wholly colonial practice – and results instead from a particular way of looking back (or a linear inheritance model of classical reception). In closing, it introduces Michael Rothberg’s concept of the ‘implicated spectator’ as a way to return agency to the spectator in an assemblage-thinking model.