GEOFFREY CHAUCER'S THE CANTERBURY TALES begins with “sondry folk, by aventure yfalle” [various people fallen together by chance] gathering in Southwark across the river from the City of London. A mixed assemblage of people of different genders, ages, professions, and regional backgrounds, they form a temporary and at times fragile community (a “felaweshipe” or “compaignye”) traveling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, and along the route they tell stories on topics as varied as romantic love, violence, class conflict, religious devotion and conversion, geopolitics, philosophical matters, and sex. This chapter considers how modern-day poets of color use Chaucerian materials not only for the purposes of humor and light-hearted social satire (as they might be expected to do). They also—on a much more serious note—subvert longstanding Eurocentric cultural and linguistic norms, and they intertwine themes of race and migration to give testimony to long histories of violence and ongoing systems of oppression around the globe.

In modern-day Chaucerian adaptations by people of color, mobility—in both its physical and sociopolitical dimensions—drives the storytelling enterprise. In Chaucerian adaptations that transport the Canterbury pilgrimage into the present day while also relocating the pilgrimage to disparate locations worldwide, the storytelling narrators are always in motion, and it is impossible to disassociate the fictive speakers from their surrounding sociopolitical environments. Writing from a Caribbean perspective, Barbara Lalla observes that “Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales assembles and confronts identities continuously on the move, displaced from their ‘proper’ categories, travelling light in the characteristically en route condition of the pilgrim,” and “[p]ostcolonial writing in the Caribbean and elsewhere” is similarly “peopled by travellers. Travel facilitates shifting positions from which to view what is given out as reality … Implicated in travel is the denial of fixity.” Contemporary adaptations of Chaucer often use pilgrimage and its mixed storytelling potentials to explore present-day interplays of local and global phenomena and the “denial of fixity” that pervades transit, dislocation, and uprootedness, as well as ever-shifting ideas of home and (un)belonging. Although some modern Chaucerian poets focus on one city or neighborhood—or even a particular street—some explore a dispersal of voices and bodies across global trajectories.