Beginning in 1740, the passage of a series of antiliteracy laws formally racialized reading in America. The expansion of those antiliteracy laws authorized whites to determine by sight, and not slave status, who was to be designated black and mandated to illiteracy, therefore, bringing sight and reading into peculiar proximity as a predicate for reading bodies and reading texts. A prehistory of these intersections exists in Othello’s interrogation of sight’s reliability in determining racial knowledge at a moment when a broader cultural and philosophical debate about the stability of sight’s relation to knowledge was underway. This chapter argues that Othello presents a unique anatomy of an actual reading process during which an audience’s seemingly secure knowledge of racialized blackness is subverted. Shakespeare “interpellates” or calls out the audience’s white reading identity to posit its unreliability. Recent developments in “blind spot” theory and empirical research relative to automatic white preference prolong this history of unreliable sight, providing further explanatory tools for representing the phenomenon of unreliable racial reading of bodies and texts.

Chapter 3 focuses on Paul Auster’s autobiographical diptych (Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013)) which are both entirely written in the second-person pronoun. It demonstrates why the pronoun is particularly fitting a choice in the general economy of life writing and memory gathering of Auster’s enterprise. The second-person pronoun is also shown to be instrumental in the interpersonal connection Auster is ethically constructing with his readers, making his own personal experience somehow shareable. ‘You’ positions the reader in a most singular way in the intrapersonal dialogue Auster is having with himself, placing her close to his deictic centre, as a sort of co-habitant of his mental space. The American author’s autobiographical works most unusually written in a doubly subjective ‘you’ indeed pragmatically invites the reader to meet him half way via the ethical vector that the second person represents.

The aesthetics of the self as inextricably linked to an unruly affective economy are explored in Chapter 5 with respect to Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I also highlight the novel’s subtle intertextual arrangements and literary echoes which are part of a larger symphony of mirrorings that form a recurrent principle ramifying at different levels of the text. I track the various references to Othello, Heart of Darkness, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts of the Arab Nahda (renaissance) that are widely interspersed throughout the novel. Finally, I examine Mustafa Sa’eed’s motivation toward self-authorship and the ability to fashion his own identity autonomously and in complete control both of its contingent processes and of their final product. He does this through the deployment of exoticizing orientalist stereotypes, which are rendered completely redundant when he encounters his wife Jean Morris.

This chapter examines the ritual of Morning Assembly, the typical start to an Indian school day, which has long been ingrained within the Indian educational system, and, importantly, is considered to be “quite central in the approach to ethics education” (Duesund, 2013, p. 146). Constructed as a space for the inculcation of moral values regarding, among other aspects, citizenship and personal growth, this ritual typically entails dissemination of news, singing of patriotic and devotional songs in multiple languages, and edifying lectures. As part of a broader investigation of young boys at an orphanage in suburban New Delhi that entailed participant observation, audiovisual recordings, and interviews, the chapter focuses on two teachers’ lectures during the Morning Assembly to demonstrate how through the content, participation frameworks, and spatial and intercorporeal organization, the Morning Assembly is both a crucial institutional ritual and a dynamic site for socializing Indian children into specific dispositions and stances towards authority and knowledge. It argues that socialization into expected epistemic and moral stances is simultaneous and deeply entangled.