Dayan, Colin 1949- (Joan Dayan)

PERSONAL:

Born 1949. Education: Smith College, B.A. (summa cum laude); City University of New York, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Vanderbilt University, Station B #351654, 2301 Vanderbilt Pl., 331 Benson Hall, Nashville, TN 37235. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, instructor, 1980; Yale University, New Haven, CT, assistant professor, 1981-86; City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, associate professor, 1986-1990; University of Arizona, Tucson, professor, 1992-2001, regents professor, 1998-2001; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, professor of English, 2001-04, African studies faculty member, 2002-04, professor of comparative literature and literary theory, 2003-04; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, Robert Penn Warren professor of the humanities, 2004—. Visiting professor, University of Michigan, 2001.

MEMBER:

Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

City University Graduate Center predoctoral fellowship, 1976-79; Musurillo Memorial Scholarship in Latin, City University, 1978-79; Danforth Fellowship, 1979-1980; A. Whitney Griswold Research Grant, Yale University, 1983; Social Science Research Council Award, 1985-86; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1985-86; Shelby Cullom Davis Center fellow, Princeton University, 1990-91; PCS-CUNY Research Award, City University of New York, 1990-92; Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award, University of Arizona, 1993-94; Mortar Board Citation Award for Contribution to the Field of Caribbean Social History and Literature, University of Arizona, 1996; Princeton Program in Law and Public Affairs fellow, 2000-01; Guggenheim Fellowship in law, 2004-05. Listed in "Notable Essays of 1996," Best American Essays of 1997, for "Looking for Ghosts"; "Notable Essays of 1997," Best American Essays of 1998, for "The Blue Room in Florence"; "Notable Essays of 2003," Best American Essays of 2004, for "The Dogs."

WRITINGS:

(Translator and author of introduction; as Joan Dayan) René Dépestre, A Rainbow for the Christian West, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1977.

(As Joan Dayan) Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

(As Joan Dayan) Haiti, History, and the Gods, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1995.

The Story of Cruel and Unusual, foreword by Jeremy Waldron, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric Carlson, G.K. Hall, 1987; Poe and His Times, edited by Benjamin Fisher, Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990; Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, edited by Nancy Miller and Joan DeJean, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Academic Practice, edited by Sarah Lowell, University of Texas Press, 1994; After Colonialism: Imperialism and the Colonial Aftermath, edited by Gyan Prakash, Princeton University Press, 1995; Repenser la Créolité, edited by Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Maryse Condé, Editions Karthala, 1995; Subjects, Nations, and Citizens, Duke University Press, 1995; The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, University of Minnesota Press, 1996; Sacred Possessions, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Rutgers University Press, 1997; Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality, edited by Susan Aiken, Sally Marston, Penny Waterstone, and Ann Brigham, University of Arizona Press, 1998; Caribbean Francophone Writing: An Introduction, edited by Sam Haigh, Berg Publishers, 1999; History, Memory, and the Law, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, University of Michigan Press, 1999; The Woman, the Writer, and Caribbean Society: Essays on Literature and Culture, UCLA CAAS Publications, 1998; Slavery in the Francophone World: Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities, edited by Doris Kadish, University of Georgia Press, 2000; For the Geography of a Soul: In Honor of Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Timothy Reiss and Rhonda Cobham, African World Press, 2001; Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, edited by Lisabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Yvette Romero, St. Martin's Press, 2001; Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Lilian Weissberg, Oxford University Press, 2001; Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literatures, edited by Timothy Reiss, Africa World Press, 2002; Materializing Democracy, edited by Dana Nelson and Russ Castronovo, Duke University Press, 2002; Colonial Saints, edited by Allen Greer, Routledge, 2002; Histoires et identité dans la Carïbe, edited by Mamdou Diouf and Ulbe Bosma, Editions Karthala, 2004; and Cities without Citizens: Statelessness and Settlements in Early America, edited by Eduardo Ca- dava and Aaron Levy, Slought Foundation and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2003. Contributor to journals and periodicals, including the Arizona Quarterly, Yale Review, Southwest Review, Research in African Literature, World Literature Today, Yale French Studies, London Review of Books, Representations, Boston Review, Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor, American Literary History, New Literary History, American Literature, and Raritan.

SIDELIGHTS:

An English and literature professor who has taught comparative literature and romance languages, Colin Dayan (also known as Joan Dayan) has written on such topics as postcolonial, African, women's, and travel literature. Her concern for human rights has led her to unique interpretations of writing in the books Haiti, History, and the Gods and The Story of Cruel and Unusual.

After releasing her translation of René Dépestre's A Rainbow for the Christian West, Dayan released her first original work, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction in which she traces Edgar Allan Poe's literary roots to American author Jonathan Edwards, as well as commenting on the influence of Calvinism on Poe's writings. "No critic before Joan Dayan has placed such emphasis on Poe's links to early American literature," observed R.C. De Prospo in an Early American Literature review, "and none has implied such opposition to the received wisdom of Poe's modernity." De Prospo noted that other literary critics have mentioned these ties, but not to the extent Dayan does. The critic continued: "The book does more than just add to the corpus of Poe criticism. The book reorganizes it, making possible the existence of a new phenomenon—Poe's difference…. Dayan's book cohere[s] into a genuine position in the Poe criticism." While Poe has typically been considered as a modern or even postmodern writer, Dayan positions him solidly within earlier literary traditions. American Literature reviewer Kent Ljungquist felt that "Dayan's handling of Edwards is tendentious, [and] her marshalling of relevant Poe scholarship, particularly in the periodical literature, is incomplete." Still, the critic felt that "Dayan's study, written in energetic style, offers challenging reading of a fairly broad range of Poe's tales." De Prospo felt that, by placing Poe within early American literature, Dayan might be helping to "support the theoretical questioning of the prevailing ethnocentric definition of American literature as a whole, and so help to make common cause between early American literary studies and those other, most often marginal, American literary studies that are working to advance the theoretical revolution in American literary scholarship that is by now very long overdue. Dayan's Fables of Mind takes us forward—and reminds us how far we still have to go."

Dayan's Haiti, History, and the Gods is a challenging work that reexamines the reality of Haiti through its literature, rituals (particularly voodoo), and history. The first part of the book, titled "Rituals of History," provides a review of Haiti's complex history as an island populated by slaves that managed to rebel and gain independence, though it fell into dictatorship. She examines much of this history by its connection to local folklore, which she maintains is rooted not in myth but in actual events of the past. "Joan Dayan's task is to unpick some of the recurring obsessions which make up this discourse, revealing how Haiti and its history came to reflect a series of particularly European and, more specifically, French preoccupations," according to James Ferguson in Race and Class. The author reveals both how Europeans viewed Haiti and how the Haitians themselves have done so. For example, she notes that Europeans consider the country as a black version of France. This is evident in the fact that Europeans consider Toussaint Louverture to be the hero of Haitian independence, while in Haiti itself the illiterate Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who desired to exterminate all whites on the island, is a more prominent and respected figure. "Her analysis of the cult of Dessalines is fascinating," wrote Ferguson, "looking at the way in which nationalist historians resurrected his official reputation as father of independence while popular, oral story-telling treats him more as a voodoo lwa or god, open to a number of different roles and personae." The history section of the book also explores the role of women in Haitian culture.

Several critics found the second part of the book, in which Dayan examines Haitian literature, the most fascinating. Asserting that the author is "at her best" in this section, Commonweal contributor John P. Hogan commented: "Against a backdrop of Senghor, Cesaire, Fanon, and Zora Neale Hurston, she examines Haiti's tales of ‘land, women, and gods.’ She concentrates on the novels of Marie Chauvet, ‘perhaps the greatest writer of Haitian fiction.’ Voodoo is the hermeneutical thread throughout the quilt, Catholicism the blunt and destructive needle." Haitian views of Europeans and of the island's slave history is revealed in the tradition of voodoo there, Dayan points out. The idea of a zombi, "a soulless husk deprived of freedom—is the ultimate sign of loss and dispossession," as Erika Bourguignon explained in an Antioch Review assessment of the book. Voodoo represented an alternative to the Catholic Church, which the Haitians resented for tolerating slavery, and as a way of embracing their African roots through spiritualism. Thus, Dayan also explores the rituals of Haiti in her work.

Weaving together history, literature, and spiritualism makes Haiti, History, and the Gods a "provocative and demanding book," wrote Ferguson, while Research in African Literature reviewer Clarisse Zima described it as "strange and wonderful." Praising the "sound scholarship" of the text, Zima further observed that "Dayan argues that if the tired cliches of our imperial past are recirculated with such obsessive regularity, it is because these tropes conveniently serve to evacuate the still brutal reality of present-day Haiti." Hogan concluded that Dayan "to a great extent succeeds in her creative anthropological examination of race, religion, and gender in colonial Haiti."

While Dayan's next book, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, is less concerned about literature, language still plays a role in her analysis of injustice. The issue here is how the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. Supreme Court have interpreted the ideas of cruel and unusual punishment in their rulings and policies allowing torture of accused terrorists. The author makes a thorough study of the issue all the way back to before the U.S. Civil War and arguments about justifying the treatment of slaves. With this long history of mistreatment, Dayan concludes that American policy has grown tolerant of injustice when abusive practices have proven convenient.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1997, Thomas O. Ott, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 231.

American Literature, May, 1988, Kent Ljungquist, review of Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction, pp. 295-297.

Antioch Review, summer, 1996, Erika Bourguignon, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 1996, S.D. Glazier, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 1709.

Commonweal, October 25, 1996, John P. Hogan, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 27.

Early American Literature, December, 1988, R.C. De Prospo, "Early American Poe," review of Fables of Mind, pp. 328-344.

Historian, summer, 1997, Ada Ferrer, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January, 1989, Bob Regan, review of Fables of Mind, p. 137.

Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2007, David L. Ulin, "Crossing the Line," review of The Story of Cruel and Unusual.

Natural History, November, 1995, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 24.

Race and Class, January 1, 1997, James Ferguson, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 94.

Reference & Research Book News, July, 1996, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods, p. 20.

Research in African Literatures, summer, 1997, Clarisse Zimra, review of Haiti, History, and the Gods.

Times Literary Supplement, January 8, 1988, I.M. Walker, review of Fables of Mind, p. 40.

ONLINE

Vanderbilt University English Department Web site,http://www.vanderbilt.edu/english/ (March 20, 2008), faculty profile.