SOURCE: “Playin' ‘mas,’ Hustling Respect: Multicultural Masculinities in Two Stories by Austin Clarke,” in Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in ‘New Canadian’ Narratives, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 29–51.

In the following essay, Coleman uses Judith Butler's theory of gender performance to understand the use of masculinity as an assertion of cultural resistance in Clarke's short stories, “A Man” and “How He Does It.”

Austin Clarke has published fifteen volumes of fiction and autobiography since 1964, making him one of the most prolific writers living in Canada today. Yet, despite the Barbadian-born writer's considerable Canadian success, most of the responses to Clarke's work to date have come from critics who share his Caribbean background. Lloyd W. Brown's El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke's Fiction (1989); the 1994 biography by Stella Algoo-Baksh; articles by Victor Ramraj, Horace Goddard, Frank Birbalsingh, Anthony Boxill, and Keith S. Henry—all...