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.

In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vasco Miranda describes the artist Aurora da Gama Zogoiby’s work as ‘“Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” in which the unifying principle was “Technicolor-Story-Line”’. This also seems like a fitting description for Salman Rushdie’s visual style of storytelling. This chapter maps the broader context of the writer’s engagement with visual art and culture. It begins by examining the playful and political mobilization of visual intertexts in The Moor’s Last Sigh through the links between the character Aurora Zogoiby and the Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. It then juxtaposes the visual interweaving in the 1995 novel with The Golden House by considering the visually established connection between the DC Comics supervillain Joker and the then soon-to-be elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. Beyond this engagement with the visual on a narrative level, Rushdie has collaborated with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Tom Phillips. Many others have created visual artworks based on Rushdie himself and his fictional work. The last section of the chapter analyses Rushdie and Kapoor’s collaboration, Blood Relations, a project that attempts a convergence of verbal and visual media, linking debates around visual representation, political engagement, and aesthetic autonomy in the face of violence.