The Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Vienna is proud to announce the 8th Vienna Lecture in Canadian Studies, to be delivered on November 18, 2025, by Prof. Michael A. Bucknor of University of Alberta. Prof. Bucknor will present his talk, titled "Queer Freedom in Caribbean Canadian Narratives," at the main building of the University of Vienna, Hörsaal 32 (1st floor), starting at 9:45 am.
The event is free and open to the public.
We hope to see you there!
Toward Decolonial Interrogations & Reparative Epistemologies: Queer Freedom in Caribbean Canadian Narratives
The naturalized assumption about Caribbean sexual citizenship and geo-politics that positions savior-host societies in the global north and oppressor-home-societies in the global south requires critical engagement. Rather than a finalized response to this main issue and its related questions, this lecture in its nascent stage is more a provocation and an initial mobilization of the interrogations we might make, as well as to outline some of the critical concepts that might help us along the way to think through this issue. I will give priority to the work of writers such as Jamaican/Canadian Makeda Silvera’s The Heart Does Not Bend and Vincentian/Canadian H. Nigel Thomas’s Easily Fooled, in order to position Canada as a fruitful site to explore Caribbean/Canadian sexual citizenship and queer geo-politics. The usual critical production of queer migration sanctuaries often relies on a teleological investment in narratives of progress, often marked by an obligatory coming-out story, as liberatory endpoint. Beyond the idea of progress, the nature of freedom itself, the nature of sexual desire, and the multiple sites and intersectional matrices of queer oppression emerge in my mind as issues that trouble the routine accounts of queer freedom‘s geo-politics. In my decolonial enquiries, I work between Deborah Thomas’ reparation’s framework as an epistemology of historical accountability in confronting the exceptional violence of the Caribbean and Matthew Chin’s reparation’s conception of “fractal repair,” that moves “away from narratives of overcoming history,” to emphasizing strategies of living with the unfinished project of queer freedom.
