Exile, Diaspora, and Sovereignty: Rethinking the Medieval Canon on Indigenous Lands

Attentiveness to the land we live and work on requires that we resituate our relationships to monuments of literary history, and to one another. Drawing upon the words–and the artwork–of Lenape Delaware scholar and activist Joanne Barker, this article focuses on two recent handbooks, The Oxford Handbook of Dante (2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (2020). The tension of individual and community, exile and diaspora, solitariness and relationality, found in Dante looks very different when viewed in light of work created by Indigenous writers and artists, and to the view of relationality, responsibility, and situatedness expressed through it.