A Politics of Proxy Reading

This essay asks why nineteenth-century British children's fiction locates illiteracy in the West Indies. I compare abolitionists’ accusation that planters mistake the bodily work of looking at books for the mental effort of understanding them with post-Emancipation debates about the balance of power between a woman who reads aloud and a man who listens. Finally, I ask how that dyad changes once proxy reading becomes confined to two scenarios: an upper-middle-class parent reading to a child or a paid voice actor recording audiobooks for a multitasking consumer.