This book examines the representation of masculinities in the fictions and autobiographies of some of Canada's most exciting writers, including Austin Clarke, Dany Laferrière, Neil Bissoondath, Michael Ondaatje, Ven Begamudré, and Rohinton Mistry, to show how cross-cultural migration disrupts assumed codes for masculine behaviour and practice. It is the first book-length study of masculinities in Canadian literature and also the first to discuss these prominent postcolonial writers in relation to one another.

Coleman founds his study on the belief that literary endeavour is socially productive, reflecting but also participating in the production of social practices and identities, and therefore it is a work of cultural commentary as well as literary criticism. The book contends that we can produce alternative masculinities by reading masculinities that challenge our current assumptions, by reading masculinities that are themselves composed of contradictory segments rather than monolithic wholes, and by reading alternatively to elaborate a plethora of masculinities. By including fragments of the author/critic's own autobiography in the text, it also dispenses with the illusion of the all-knowing, unbiased reader.

Masculine Migrations is cutting-edge scholarship and an eminently readable book, which will challenge, provoke discussion, and encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue.

After finishing high school in Ethiopia, Daniel Coleman earned university degrees at the University of Regina and the University of Alberta. He now holds the Canada Research Chair in Critical Ethnicity and Race Study in the English department of McMaster University. Daniel Coleman is a leading researcher in the depiction of immigrant men in Canadian literature. He has won the John Charles Polanyi Prize for his study of how literary texts produce and reinforce categories of cultural identification such as gender, ethnicity and nationality. His critically acclaimed book, Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in "New Canadian" Narratives, published in 1998 by University of Toronto Press, is considered the foundational Canadian work in the field. While being a bahir-zaff throughout his childhood brought Daniel Coleman the pain of never fully belonging, it also gave him the immeasurable benefits and insights of an intercultural life. Several of his essays on his missionary childhood have appeared in magazines and journals. "The Babies in the Colonial Washtub," included in a revised form in The Scent of the Eucalyptus, won a Silver Medal in the National Magazine Awards. 

Daniel Coleman's profile page