Michael A. Bucknor, PhD, MA, BA, DipTeaching

Area of Study / Keywords

Caribbean/Canadian Literature African Diaspora Cultures Masculinities Popular Culture

About

Michael A. Bucknor is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice in the Department of English and Film Studies. He comes from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus in Jamaica, where he was the Chair of the Department of Literatures in English and Public Orator for the Mona Campus, both for two terms. He completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario on a Commonwealth Scholarship, where he won the McIntosh Award for the Best Ph.D. Dissertation Lecture. He also won the 1999 USIS Fellowship (University of Louisville), the 2002 Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Post-doctoral Fellowship (University of Michigan), 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 was former Chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS), currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West Indian Literature. He is co-editor with Alison Donnell of the 2011 Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, guest co-editor with Kezia Page of the 2018 Special Issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature on Marlon James, and guest co-editor with Conrad James of the 2016 Special Issue of Caribbean Quarterly on Caribbean Masculinities. His most recent publications are “Austin Clarke’s ‘Saga Boys’: Black Aesthetics as Epistemology” for Special Issue on Austin Clarke, edited by Rinaldo Walcott, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Number 43, Winter 2021: 76-95, https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/topia-42-007?journalCode=topia and co-authored with Cornel Bogle, “‘Imagining the [Unbounded] Grounds of [Caribbean Canadian] Consciousness,’”  “Introduction” to Special Issue on “Recognition and Recovery of Caribbean Canadian Literary Production” co-edited with Cornel Bogle, Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Production. Vol. 10, 2021. 9-48, https://revistas.usal.es/dos/index.php/2254-1179/article/view/30550/28669 

Research

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. Critical race theory, an intersectional approach and decolonial politics are central to his work. He has recently examined and/or supervised PhD dissertations on Caribbean poetry, black and indigenous relationality in Black Canadian Literature, intergenerational queer sexualities in Caribbean literature and Canadian and Caribbean literary history. He is particularly interested in supervising graduate research projects on Black Canadian or Caribbean Canadian publishing and/or cultural production, as well as Black masculinities and sexualities in the African diaspora, especially with a focus on popular culture. 

ENGL 680 - Post-Colonial Texts

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