Chaganti, Seeta. "Teaching Chaucer and justice." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/teaching-chaucer-and-justice. [Date accessed].
Teaching Chaucer and justice
Readings on justice that can help reimagine ways to teach Chaucer.
The following works have informed both the way I conceive of the goals of my Chaucer class and the way I present the Chaucer material itself to my students. Many students have already had exposure to this area of thought and criticism, as well as to many of these authors and their major influences. In a number of instances, they will have more background knowledge than you do as a medievalist, which is a wonderful situation for you and the students to be in. This list is highly impressionistic and not meant to be exhaustive in any sense—they are the books that were paramount for me when teaching my most recent Chaucer class.
Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering our Cities. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021.
Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. California: University of California Press, 2023.
Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso Books, 2016.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Darwish, Mahmoud. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. California: University of California Press, 2013.
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.
Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.
Di Prima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968, 2021.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963, 2004.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. California: University of California Press, 2007.
Hall, Stuart, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Palgrave: 1978, 2013.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. New York: Penguin Random House, 2002.
Maher, Geo. A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete. London: Verso Books, 2021.
Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Murakawa, Naomi. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Neocleous, Mark. The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Verso Books, 2021.
Okihiro, Gary. Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 2020.
Rodríguez, Dylan. White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.
Further learning
"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice
“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.
Recommended
Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare’s works at large, and early modern literature more broadly, all deal with constructions of race. Shakespeare’s sonnets are especially fruitful for considering how the languages of fairness and darkness are used in nuanced ways to develop particular understandings of race.
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