Decolonizing Chaucer

UCL English Department

Race, Power, and Poetics Seminar:  Shazia Jagot (University of York)

University College London

<p>A number of Arabic and Persian polymathic figures appear in Chaucer’s poetry: ‘Avycen’ (Avicenna; Ibn Sina) ‘Averois’ (Averroes; Ibn Rushd); ‘Myssal’ (Messahalla; Masha’Allah ibn Athari)’ all of whom encapsulate an extraordinary range of rich scholarship on the natural sciences, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, alchemy, cultivated and produced in locations that stretched across multiple Islamic worlds from Samanid Persia, to Almohad Andalusia, and Abbasid Baghdad. And yet, more than often within the context of Chaucer’s poetics, these names are either dismissed as colourful citations or collapsed into a generic mould of Arabic medieval philosophers except, as in the case of Messahalla, a possible direct source is located that might indicate ‘influence’. The question of sources (and analogues) is a well-established bedrock of Chaucer scholarship that brings with it the thorny notion of influence. As the art historian Hans Belting notes, the idea of influence is itself colonial seeking to enforce one dominant narrative over another - ‘conceding a non-European culture’s influence in one area but still relegating it to a lower level of importance overall’ (Baghdad and Florence, p. 4.). With this in mind, this paper seeks to ask how can we move away from the thorny colonial notion of influence in Chaucer scholarship? What is at stake when we shift from an unconscious, implicit understanding of acknowledging that an Arabic intellectual heritage had a presence in Middle English to a conscious deployment of that understanding? How might this open up ways of working across cultures and languages beyond Northern Europe in medieval literary studies? And how can we begin to undo the hierarchies and structures of critical study that have led the approaches and shaped perspectives on Chaucer’s literature</p><p></p>

Decolonizing Chaucer

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Decolonizing Chaucer

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