Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora (New Black Studies Series)

Literature & Fiction

Chancy, Myriam J.A.

History & Criticism

University of Illinois Press

In Autochthonomies, Myriam J. A. Chancy engages readers in an interpretive journey. She lays out a radical new process that invites readers to see creations by artists of African descent as legible within the context of African diasporic historical and cultural debates. By invoking a transnational African/diasporic lens and negotiating it through a lakou or ”yard space,” we can see such identities transfigured, recognized, and exchanged. Chancy demonstrates how the process can examine the salient features of texts and art that underscore African/diasporic sensibilities and render them legible. What emerges is a potential for richer readings of African diasporic works that also ruptures the Manichean binary dynamics that have dominated previous interpretations of the material. The result: an enriching interpretive mode focused on the transnational connections between subjects of African descent as the central pole for reader investigation. 
A bold challenge to established scholarship, Autochthonomies ranges from Africa to Europe and the Americas to provide powerful new tools for charting the transnational interactions between African cultural producers and sites.

Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women

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.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts & Hobbies

Rutgers University Press

Spirit of Haiti (SUNY: Afro-Latinx Futures)

United States

State Univ of New York Pr

-Finalist Aspen Words Literary Prize 
-Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 
At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. 
Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster——Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Artfully weaving together these lives, this gripping story gives witness to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man. 
Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and——at the same time——an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.

What Storm, What Thunder: A Novel

Literary

Harper-perennial

This collection ponders the personal and political implications for Haitians at home and abroad resulting from the devastating 2010 earthquake. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. As the post-earthquake political situation unfolded, Myriam Chancy worked to illuminate on-the-ground concerns, from the vulnerable position of Haitian women to the failures of international aid. Originally presented at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, and circulated in other ways, her essays and creative responses preserve the reactions and urgencies of the years following the disaster. In Harvesting Haiti, Chancy examines the structures that have resulted in Haiti's post-earthquake conditions and reflects at key points after the earthquake on its effects on vulnerable communities. Her essays make clear the importance of sustaining and supporting the dignity of Haitian lives and of creating a better, contextualized understanding of the issues that mark Haitians' historical and present realities, from gender parity to the vexed relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

University of Texas Press

Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti―a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies―the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti’s exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance. Her premise is that writers Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons attempt to defy fears of “otherness” by assuming the role of “archaeologists of amnesia.” They seek to elucidate women’s variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications―identifications wholly defined as male. They reach beyond the confining limits of national borders to discuss gender, race, sexuality, and class in ways that render possible the linking of all three nations. Nations such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are still locked in battles over self-determination, but, as Chancy demonstrates, women’s gendered revisionings may open doors to less exclusionary imaginings of social and political realities for Caribbean people in general.

From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti―a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies―the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti’s exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance. Her premise is that writers Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons attempt to defy fears of “otherness” by assuming the role of “archaeologists of amnesia.” They seek to elucidate women’s variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications―identifications wholly defined as male. They reach beyond the confining limits of national borders to discuss gender, race, sexuality, and class in ways that render possible the linking of all three nations. Nations such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are still locked in battles over self-determination, but, as Chancy demonstrates, women’s gendered revisionings may open doors to less exclusionary imaginings of social and political realities for Caribbean people in general.

Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile

Temple Univ Pr

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.

The Loneliness of Angels

Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

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Books by Chancy, Myriam J.A.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chancy, Myriam J.A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora (New Black Studies Series)

Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora (New Black Studies Series)

Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women

Spirit of Haiti (SUNY: Afro-Latinx Futures)

What Storm, What Thunder: A Novel

Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters

From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile

The Loneliness of Angels