Michael Bucknor

Decolonial Friendships: Global Black Intimacies and Artistic Institutional Limits 

Intervening between Canadian literary and cultural historiography, Black transnational studies, Caribbean literary histories, and Black biopolitics, this research project argues that art institutional archives expose the artistic vulnerabilities and resilience strategies of Caribbean Canadian writers. Turning to affective economies, informal Black Atlantic circuits of artistic collaborations and affective friendships, the research project maps the affective registers of racial vulnerabilities and foregrounds the mechanisms that Black subjects employ to reframe suffering as imaginative pathways for new forms of being (Weheliye 2014). The project will demonstrate how Canadian cultural institutions such as the CBC, the Canada Council for the Arts, literary magazines such as Tamarack Review and the culture of book reviews, and publishing outfits such as Sister Vision Press and Sandbery Press also position Canada as a site of Black global cultural production and international literary development. In the research, I use intimacy as an analytic framework to mine the affective affiliations of Black artistic friendships (Gandhi 2006; Lowe 2006), and unexpected “diasporic” intimacies (Bucknor 2017) to demonstrate how Black subjects preserve their human dignity within delimiting arts and media institutions. Beyond showing Canada’s connection to Black transnational networks, this project offers a model for the applicability of the conceptual framework of intimacy to decolonize Black transnational history and to offer a different epistemological framework to counter racial capitalism.  

Biography 

Michael A. Bucknor is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies at the University of Alberta. Formerly, he was Chair of the Department of Literatures in English and Public Orator at the Mona Campus, University of the West Indies. He was awarded the 2018 and 2020 UWI Principal’s Award for Best Research Article, and the 2019 Institute of Jamaica’s Gold Musgrave Medal for Eminence in the field of Literature. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West Indian Literature. He carries out research on the African Diaspora, Austin Clarke, Caribbean-Canadian writing, Black Canadian cultural production, postcolonial literatures and theory, masculinities, sexualities, and popular culture. He is co-editor with Alison Donnell of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2011, 2014). Forthcoming publications include the book chapter, “Austin Clarke’s ‘Out-a-order Poetics,” in The Routledge Handbook on Black Canadian Literature (2024) and the monograph, Olive Senior, in The Caribbean Biography Series, UWI Press, 2025.