What does prophetic poetry look like now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, and what could it become? The poets of this Afterword – Rob Halpern, Hezy Leskly, Anne Carson, and M. NourbeSe Philip – take up the countertradition of “weak prophecy” in various ways. They turn toward what is weak and ungainly, torn, stuttering, glitchy, and leaky, in order to “untune” (as Halpern calls it) national melodies, to reach into the “stinking, eviscerated innards” (Philip) of the language of oppression, to suggest a new way of organizing what is inside and outside, “another human essence than self” (Carson). Their prophetic untuning does not represent (only) a lack or a loss; it is not merely the expression of the poverty, violence, and suffering of the contemporary moment. By marking this poetry as “prophetic,” we can say that it means, through its very weakness, to use a dialectic gaze to actively redeem the past together with the future.

Chapter 2 explores how law enforcement’s ability to engage discursively with suspects and other lay persons is limited by the law. Judicial rulings regarding suspects’ rights during custodial interrogation, such as the right to counsel, provide insights into how the United States federal court system, led by the main court of the land the Supreme Court of the United States, views suspects’ constitutional rights, on the one hand, and the societal benefit of police officers being able to conduct criminal investigations, on the other. The chapter discusses the evolution of the right to counsel in the federal courts, since the seminal Miranda v. Arizona (1966) ruling, and the insights this history provides in framing the law as a facilitator or, alternatively, a deterrent to suspects invoking their right to counsel, prior to the onset of custodial interrogation. This analysis of opinions from the Court, circuit courts, district courts, and a few military courts, that make up the book’s corpus, will shed light on how judges have viewed the role of police in society, through time, and whether some in the judiciary consider the Miranda ruling as overreaching in its ‘intended’ constitutional protections.

As prophetic texts were charged with new meanings by readers of the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exegetes, philosophers, artists, and poets tried to define what made a prophet strong and successful, hoping to find new models for artistic inspiration and political and national leadership, as well as integrity, courage, and authenticity. Yet even as prophetic figures were idealized as powerful men who could stride with towering authority and speak with majestic resonance, they also served as emblems of exile, failure, and alienation. Modern representations of prophecy vacillate between emptiness and fullness, strength and weakness. This instability in the representation of prophets and prophecy originates in the biblical text itself. We can trace a countertradition of poets, who, rather than trying to find heroes, create hierarchies, and systematize the biblical text, using prophecy’s instability to enliven and enrich their own texts. They actively exploit the fissures of both ancient and modern prophecy to create stirring, innovative, and often radical literary works from prophetic weakness itself.

Chapter 6 will explore paths to moving forward with police interrogation reform in the United States, parting from the lessons of other countries that have undertaken reform, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Norway, and Canada, while focusing on three key areas: 1) police interrogation techniques, 2) the interview of vulnerable populations, and 3) changes in case law related to the reading of rights, invocation of rights, the use of trickery and deception, as well as the use of confessions to build and prosecute a criminal case. The goal of the chapter is to consider ways in which the issues presented in this book can be revisited to change the current state of police interrogation in the United States. This will require changes across the board: legislative, legal, police interviewing training, and also an acknowledgment of the role of cognitive, cultural, and sociolinguistic factors in police-suspect discursive interactions. A change of perspective on the presence of counsel in the interview room is also explored, looking at other jurisdictions outside of the United States which provide access to counsel to custodial suspects.

Chapter 6 scrutinizes how the corporate structures set up by Texaco shaped social dynamics and daily life in the oil fields. Texaco’s facilities constituted fenced-off and almost independent spatial enclaves in the rainforest that ensured an unobstructed resource extraction based on imported labor and a “masculine” work ethic. The discriminatory hierarchies established within the oil industry shaped the experiences of the Ecuadorean and international oilmen. The workers’ position within the hierarchy of power also predisposed their relationship with nature: While the executive level was able to keep as much physical and emotional distance as possible, most oilmen were exposed to the hardships brought on by working in a tropical environment. While state institutions showed little presence in the region, national policies and military forces protected the oil companies’ interests, subdued protests by oilmen and the public, and contributed to solidify the new social order. This chapter explores for the first time the oilmen’s experiences from their own perspective, offering insights into the social dimension of the metamorphosis of the Amazon.

In the Conclusion to this book, we move from looking back to assembling a future. This chapter shows that the metaphorical uses of disability that have been examined throughout the book remain with us in the present. And it attempts to set out some approaches towards ending this practice of making meaning out of bodies. This will require, the conclusion argues, more than a commitment to neoliberal diversity initiatives and to inclusion (though inclusion remains nonetheless urgent) – it will require us to decolonise the way that we look, and to disassemble the classical tradition in favour of models that insist on the receiver’s accountability. Maria Oshodi’s 1992 play Hound is an important text in this chapter, which looks beyond the line, or inheritance model of classical reception to the example of Stacey Park Milbern’s ‘crip ancestorship’ model. Ultimately, the conclusion is invested in the core questions of this book: what kind of an ancient world would we need to imagine, who would we need to take as our ancestors, and how might we organise the models that figure our relationship with it and them, in order for a more equal future to become our reality?

This introduction begins by setting up the core question of this book: why is it that disability is still frequently used as a metaphor, despite awareness that this is harmful – and what can we as readers and receivers of classical texts do about it? The role played by spectators, by models of reception, and by ways of understanding vision in this problem are underlined. The chapter introduces the concept of assemblage theory, seeing it as something that arises out of the focus on the reader evident in reception theory’s beginnings. It draws out some of the benefits of an assemblage-thinking model, weighing them against other ways of understanding reception and relation. It closes with some examination of the various activisms and limitations evident throughout the book.

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).