Education
Chancy attended the University of Manitoba in Manitoba, Canada, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy with Honors.
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( Raped and colonized, coerced and silenced--this has bee...)
Raped and colonized, coerced and silenced--this has been the position of Haitian women within their own society, as well as how they have been seen by foreign occupiers. Romanticized symbols of nationhood, they have served, however unwillingly, as a politicized site of contestation between opposing forces. In this first book-length study in English devoted exclusively to Haitian women's literature, Myriam Chancy finds that Haitian women have their own history, traditions, and stories to tell, tales that they are unwilling to suppress or subordinate to narratives of national autonomy. Issues of race, class, color, caste, nationality, and sexuality are all central to their fiction--as is an urgent sense of the historical place of women between the two U.S. occupations of the country. Their novels interrogate women's social and political stance in Haiti from an explicitly female point of view, forcefully responding to overt sexual and political violence within the nation's ambivalent political climate. Through daring and sensitive readings, simultaneously historical, fictional and autobiographical, Chancy explores this literature, seeking to uncover answers to the current crisis facing these women today, both within their country and in exile.The writers surveyed include Anne-christine d'Adesky, Ghislaine Rey Charlier, Marie Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, and Edwidge Danticat, whose work has recently achieved such high acclaim.
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( Offering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a ...)
Offering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a global context as a place of ethnic and cultural complexity, this novel explores the role of spirituality in Caribbean life and culture. Told through multiple voices in a nonlinear fashion, the narrative unfolds through the perspectives of a Haitian-Syrian merchant, Ruth, who recounts her young adulthood and final days as she intuits her imminent death; Catherine, a professional pianist living in Paris who travels home to Haiti upon hearing of her Aunt Ruth’s murder; Rose, Catherine’s mother, an empath, who is believed to have committed suicide in Canadian exile in reaction to the worst years of the Duvalier regime; Romulus, a once famous Konpa singer and an addict, who, released by rebels from a Port-au-Prince jail searches for his redemption; and Elsie, an Irish, working-class seer who emigrates to Haiti in 1847 in search of a new mystic who will guide them all. Traversing the terrains of Port-au-Prince middle-class life, working-class French Canada, expatriate Paris, the peat bogs of famine stricken Ireland, and tracing lives that cross boundaries of time and place, this is a deeply absorbing portrayal of a fragmented community whose deepest connections lie in a shared sense of spirituality.
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(A moving tale of contemporary Haiti dogged by a fascinati...)
A moving tale of contemporary Haiti dogged by a fascinating history and the fragile lives born of it, this novel tells how the lives of four witnesses of military-ruled Haiti during the terror-filled years of the Duvalier regime of the early 1990s intersect. These vivid characters include Léah Ochún, who rises from the sea like a siren one morning off the coast of Cap Haitien, clothes untouched by water, blue stones wrapped around her neck, eyes blind to light; Carmen, soon to be a mother, who returns to Haiti from Canada as if to the call of the vodou; Alexis, who flees the island in search of a land without strife; and Philippe, who walks the northern hills alert to ancestral voices still haunting its peaks and valleys, his gay identity exploited in tourist trade as he struggles to maintain spiritual dignity and a hold on hope, his body decaying from AIDS. This is ultimately a novel about confronting the failings of the human heart and the triumph of memory over despair.
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(Understanding exile as flight from political persecution ...)
Understanding exile as flight from political persecution or forms of oppression that single out women, Myriam J. A. Chancy concentrates on diasporic writers and filmmakers who depict the vulnerability of women to poverty and exploitation in their homelands and their search for safe refuge. These Afro-Caribbean feminists probe the complex issues of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class that limit women's lives. They portray the harsh conditions that all too commonly drive women into exile, depriving them of security and a sense of belonging in their adopted countries - the United States, Canada, or England. As they rework traditional literary forms, artists such as Joan Riley, Beryl Gilroy, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera, Audre Lorde, Rosa Guy, Michelle Cliff, and Marie Chauvet give voice to Afro-Caribbean women's alienation and longing to return home. Whether the return home is realized geographically or metaphorically, the poems, fiction, and film considered in this book speak boldly of self-definition and transformation.
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Chancy attended the University of Manitoba in Manitoba, Canada, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy with Honors.
She is currently a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati. As a writer, she focuses on Haitian culture, gender, class, sexuality, and Caribbean women"s studies. Next, she received her Master"s Degree in English Literature from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1990.
She received her Ph.
Doctorate. in English at the University of Iowa in 1994. In an essay entitled "Dancing Words: Illness and the Writing Process," Chancy details her experience with the writing process while experiencing chronic fatigue syndrome. Chancy has held several positions in academia over the course of her lifetime.
Additionally, she has held visiting professorships at both Smith College and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She currently belongs to the University of Cincinnati as a Professor of Africana Studies, where she teaches courses in African Diaspora Studies, Caribbean Literature, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Feminist Theory and Women's Studies, and Creative Writing of Fiction. She frequently contributes to journals, university presses, and national tenure review as a consequence of her expertise in Caribbean and Haitian social justice issues.
Currently, Chancy serves on the editorial advisory board for the Journal of the Modern Language Association, the Advisory Council in the Humanities of the Fetzer Institute, and the Journal of Haitian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
(A moving tale of contemporary Haiti dogged by a fascinati...)
( Offering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a ...)
( Raped and colonized, coerced and silenced--this has bee...)
(Understanding exile as flight from political persecution ...)
From 2002 until 2004, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the academic arts journal "Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism." She has taught English and Women"s Studies at Vanderbilt University as an assistant professor, at Arizona State University as an associate professor, at Louisiana State University as a full professor