Numinous Animal – Bertrand Bickersteth in conversation with Michael Bucknor

Join host Michael A. Bucknor as he talks to featured author Bertrand Bickersteth about his new memoir, Numinous Animal: Tracing the Afrofuturism of Black Cowboys.

Michael A. Bucknor’s most recent publications include the book chapter, “Austin Clarke’s ‘Out-a-order Poetics,” in The Routledge Handbook on Black Canadian Literature (2024), the co-authored journal introduction, “’Leaving Traces’: Decolonial Hauntings and Affective Ecologies” JWIL (April 2025) (written with Aon UI Abideen), and the forthcoming monograph, Olive Senior, in The Caribbean Biography Series, UWI Press (2027).

Numinous Animal explores the eclipsed history of Black cowboys on the Prairies. Part memoir, part regional history, and part literary analysis, it follows a journey of discovery through 19th- and early 20th-century cattle brands. Bickersteth confronts the legacy of branding in his own family history as someone descended from people who were touched by slavery. In tracing his family’s complicated ties to slavery, he traces lines that connect West Africa to Nova Scotia, Edmonton to Freetown, the Underground Railroad to Cowboy trails. In this way, Numinous Animal serves as a bridge between African and Albertan historical legacies. The culmination of tracing these paths is a tantalizingly poetic collision between the oubli of the archive and the promise of Afrofuturism: the creation of a font traced from the cattle brands of Black cowboys and ranchers in Alberta. Bickersteth’s artistry deconstructs marks of livelihood, ownership, and dehumanization, and reconstructs them into a language of life, freedom, and love.

This event is presented in partnership with the Centre for Literatures in Canada (CLC).