The corporeal dimensions of prayer before icons are often attributed to superstition, antiquated beliefs, or a “graced” function of metaphysical participation. In contrast to this, I develop a phenomenological analysis of corporeal substitution as a real possibility of ordinary experience, for an absent person we love strongly can come to presence in a thing before us and provoke a corporeal response. Guided by the story of the acheiropoieton, the “icon made without hands,” I show how the structure of this ordinary human practice is altered when elevated to prayerful substitution, and through its repetition over time, this allows the icon to serve as a means of communion for the believer across both visual and corporeal dimensions.

Plato consistently holds that “no one does wrong willingly.” If this is the case, how is it possible for someone to be held morally responsible for his actions? Plato does seem not only to countenance the idea of moral responsibility but to make it a central notion in his political and eschatological writings (Section 5.1). The connection between personhood and embodiment is explored and the relevance of embodiment to moral responsibility is considered in Republic and Timaeus. The possibility of incontinence or akrasia reveals the divided selfhood in the emboodied person. The concept of culpable ignorance is introduced in order to account for moral responsibility. Culpable ignorance depends on the self-relexivity of rationality (Section 5.2).

Chapter 5 proposes an interpretation of Article 12 that allows for decision-making by substitutes as a last resort through relocating personhood from recognition of autonomy to recognition of dignity. It settles on a concept of dignity as inherent, as a legal principle (not a right) that underpins human rights and the CRPD, and as having five dimensions. The first dimension recognises the equal worth or value of all human beings. The second recognises autonomy as an important component of dignity for people who have autonomy but seeks to position autonomy as only one very valuable good amongst others. The third recognises dignity as reflexive and acknowledging the interdependent, interpersonal and social nature of being human. The fourth recognises personhood as embodied and particular, thereby acknowledging the residual impacts of impairment and the materiality of our lives. The fifth dimension demands an understanding of rights as interdependent and indivisible.

What has the Black feminine body meant to literary study? What might it mean in the twenty-first century? This essay argues that African diaspora feminist literary study has often been contained by national boundaries and prescribed readings of the feminine subject “stuck” in masculinist routes and plots. Instead, this chapter turns to the materiality of the body in the work of African feminist writers and artists such as Theresa Ikoko, T. J. Dema, and Wangechi Mutu. The chapter shows how their work moves the labor of constructing, perceiving, and living through feminine embodied experience to the center of theories of diaspora. Focusing on poetry, drama, and visual art, this chapter pushes against the novel’s centrality in formulating theories of the self, nation, and diaspora identity in the field. This body of new writing and expressive culture that centers on the material body offers new routes for feminist diaspora literature and its futures across continents, genres, and contexts.

Translation in a global world is not only literary but also profoundly performative, embedded in how ideas and gestures, sounds and voices transform and move. We draw from dominant theorizations about translation as literary work and rise up to the challenge of thinking translation performatively, within a theatrical setting and beyond, as a medium, a mode and a method. Our inter-related arguments therefore sit at the intersection of three disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) formations – Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and Theatre and Performance Studies – even as they attempt to bridge another set of enduring divides, between theoretical and practical approaches to translation, between Theatre and Performance Studies. In sum, we argue that performance emerges as a generative and indispensable frame and method for thinking translation as an act that is not only transdisciplinary but also necessarily trans-medial.

The chapter explores translation between images and language through the practice of audio description for blind and partially sighted theatre audiences. This practice exceeds analytical models such as ekphrasis or intersemiotic translation because of the particular circumstances in which the texts are received: they are performed live alongside their sources (set, costume, lighting, gestures), and in dialogue with other performance modalities (such as live and recorded sound). The embodied nature of the practice affects how the describer constructs a spectatorial ‘gaze’, particularly in relation to performers’ bodies. Examples are drawn from two performances that foreground bodies and the gaze: Beauty and the Beast (Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, 2013), and a short cabaret act, Scarf Dance by Amelia Cavallo. The latter performance suggests ways in which attention to the gaze in burlesque might help to develop a ‘critical audio description’.

In this chapter, I consider how translation pertains to the body on stage as a site of multiplicity and propose the term ‘transembodiment’ in my analysis of Weronika Szczawińska and Bartosz Frąckowiak’s Komornicka. Biografia pozorna (Komornicka. Ostensible biography, 2011). My intention in considering transembodiment is to analyse the effects and limitations of physical and fictional bodies as they appear within the mimetic, representational and concrete frame of the theatre space. Ultimately, I argue that the body is itself a paradigmatic site of translation, which can neither be reduced to nor fully dislodged from language, and which is both submitted to and escapes processes of mimetic representation. In this way, I do not offer transembodiment as a methodology but rather as a structure and a consequence of the process of transmission in the theatre that invites new subjects to emerge and come into being.

In my practice-based research The Archive of Gestures, I revive an array of gestures and movements present in alternative Palestinian narratives, which were suppressed by Israel and left out of mainstream Palestinian history, by re-enacting, deconstructing and commenting on the gestures and context they were performed in, using interactive video dance installation and participatory performance as artistic and archival forms. In this chapter I analyse four artistic works that resulted from this research: A Fidayee Son in Moscow (2014), Cells of Illegal Education (2016), Gesturing Refugees (2018), What My Body Can/t Remember (2019). In all the works interactivity and participation with the audience play a central role. Here, I explain how moving-thinking together, through re-enacting, transforming and transmitting latent gestural archives, helps embody and translate the stories and their gestures to the audience members’ bodies. This allows the audience to identify with the context of these stories, creating empathy and contributing towards future responsibility.

The introduction argues that ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and ephemerality inherent in mortality. It stresses the fact that these poems have assumed at least two forms of materiality: one in relation to performing bodies and another as inscribed texts. After reviewing prior scholarship in these areas, it looks at definitions of the body and the word ephêmeros in Greek poetry, including Homer, Pindar, and other lyric poets, and in Ps.-Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, before offering summaries of the chapters of the book.

Victorian sexual norms, though organized around reproductive marriage, were by no means limited to that practice. The Introduction argues that it was common in the period to consider sexual restraint – whether lifelong or temporary – to be productive of health, wellbeing, and energy that could be given to non-sexual endeavours such as religious feeling or art. This idea was found in diverse contexts, underpinned by various models of bodily function, and across the political spectrum. The Introduction outlines the place this productive continence held in an alternative Decadent tradition to that usually explored by Decadent Studies. Far from being incompatible with the embodied pleasure that was so important to Decadent aesthetics, restraint was repeatedly imagined to facilitate such experience, and to answer to the anxieties that many writers associated with the supposed ugliness, degeneration, over-crowding, and haste of the modern world. The Introduction outlines the methodological challenges of its subject and the book’s relationship with other theoretical approaches to sexuality in literature, such as Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Ideas.

This chapter sheds light on the uses of modern alchemical discourse by three artists and writers who were affiliated with surrealism: British-born artist Leonora Carrington, British artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, and Greek poet and critic Nanos Valaoritis. All three writers experimented with the potentialities of alchemical language, writing novels premised upon esotericism and myth in terms of imagery, plot, and sensibility: The Stone Door (1977) and The Hearing Trumpet (1976) by Carrington; Goose of Hermogenes (1961) and I Saw Water (2014) by Colquhoun; From the Bones Rising (1982) and Xerxes’s Treasure (1984) by Valaoritis. Influenced by several strands of the alchemical discourse, Carrington, Colquhoun, and Valaoritis resorted to ideas corroborating the transgression of the dominant Enlightenment concept of the unified rational subject, and utilized them as subversive tropes in their revision of hegemonic body politics. In this revision, identity constitution is conceptualized as a process that is open-ended, non-teleological, and performative. The chapter charts these corporeal cartographies, shedding light on the three writers’ appropriations of alchemy in their writing practices; it shows that the alchemical genre primarily functioned as a platform for the exploration of performative manifestations of identity and contributed to fecund redefinitions of the novel.