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.

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).