Chaucer’s Brown Faces: Race, Interpretation, Adaptation

This article combines critical race theory and adaptation studies to investigate racialized brownness in the Canterbury Tales and contemporary Chaucer receptions. The first section offers a close reading of somatic brownness in Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose and General Prologue, and it incorporates brown into a constellation of color terms—in conjunction with whiteness and blackness—that Chaucerians deploy to theorize medieval race metaphors and race-making. The second section builds on sociological research to examine constructions of brown as a capacious racial designation in the Middle Ages and today. The third section examines creative updates of Chaucer that explore meanings of brownness across time and space: Nigerian British poet Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales; Mexican American poet Frank Mundo’s Brubury Tales; and Indian director Avie Luthra’s “The Sea Captain’s Tale,” a screen adaptation of the Shipman’s Tale. The conclusion considers theories of “brown kinship” and their implications for Chaucer reception studies globally.