The rallying call to “decolonize the canon” emerged from the University of Cape Town's ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Campaign in early 2015. The phrase refers to a radical reconsideration of literary history; it suggests, in part, to investigate structures of domination in the education of literature from pedagogy to syllabi. Further than a reconsideration of the diversity of voices presented, some authors have emphasized “decolonizing the canon” to include the examination of how prioritized forms of poetic and prosaic structure dominate the landscape of literature and limit an expression of language that rejects the status quo. In contention with a literary tradition based in a colonial mindset, these authors have utilized subversion of form to protest the dominance of the canon in its current state. Patience Agbabi, a bisexual Black British poet, represents the latest of these efforts in her anthology Telling Tales. 

In this presentation, I will analyze how Patience Agbabi queers Chaucer’s use of rhyme royal, iambic pentameter, and feminine rhyme in her poetic response to The Canterbury Tales. In this subversion, Agbabi makes a statement on the failed physical realization of the utopian, positioning traditional form through a lens of physical violence that encroaches upon a possibility of written thought beyond the colonial canon. I argue that her use of altered structure illuminates the incompatibility of the “master’s tools,” (Audre Lorde 1984) in this case, stringent form based on medieval literary tradition, with a vision of an inclusive future. I will examine how her fascination with the failure of utopia and description of legal and bodily violence speak to this conclusion, placing the text in the political contexts of locations referenced throughout the anthology, most notably, the failed utopian commune Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark.