ONE OF THE most rewarding aspects of being an educator is learning from students and collectively creating new kinds of knowledge in the classroom. I teach medieval literature among other topics in an urban campus in Washington, DC, with a student body that includes a significant share of international students as well as American students from varied racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Such a campus environment can generate animated conversations—particularly on the topics of race and social justice.

In a recent iteration of my course on the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and modern-day adaptations of his works, one of our required texts was Telling Tales, a literary anthology by Nigerian British poet and spoken-word performance artist Patience Agbabi. In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a group of pilgrims varied in gender, age, social rank, geographical origins, and occupations engage in a storytelling contest, and Agbabi transforms Chaucer's medieval pilgrimage into a multiracial cast of storytellers in present-day London. “Sharps an Flats,” Agbabi's spoken-word counterpoint to Chaucer's anti-semitic “Prioress's Tale,” sparked a wide-ranging class discussion about modern racial violence and harmful legacies of the medieval past.

By this point in the semester, our class had already read Chaucer's “Prioress's Tale” in the original Middle English, and we had discussed our various uneasy reactions to his antisemitic story of violence set in an unspecified multiethnic Asian city inhabited by Christians and Jews. The Prioress recounts the martyrdom of a young Christian boy, and she presents her entire versified performance as if it were an extended song of prayer to the Virgin Mary; all the while, she circulates disturbing medieval stereotypes that vilify her story's Jewish characters and the narrative concludes with a state-sanctioned killing of Jews en masse. Agbabi, by contrast, assigns her spoken-word poem “Sharps an Flats” to a fictive Afro-Caribbean social justice activist in Britain who relates a story that gives posthumous voice to an individual Black victim of unprovoked violence in modern London.

Agbabi's choice to transport Chaucer's story into a radically new sociopolitical context generated a range of responses in the classroom. Some of the students who identified as African American and as Afro-Caribbean, and who were familiar with the conventions of spoken-word poetry in the US, welcomed Agbabi's engagements with social justice activism and her transformation of a medieval antisemitic narrator into a contemporary Black British performance artist committed to social justice.