Darlène Dubuisson

Darlène Dubuisson received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in October 2020. Her research interests and teaching span political and legal anthropology, activist and engaged anthropology, Black feminist anthropology, Black intellectual histories, migration, transnational studies, and speculative fiction and visual culture. Her work weaves analyses of Black radicalism, feminism, social and political movements, imagination, migration and diaspora, and crises and futures. Her primary geographic focus is the Caribbean and Latin America.

She also collaborates with Shannon Gleeson, Kate Griffith, and Patricia Campos-Medina (Cornell University) on a research project examining the effects of temporary immigration status and race on worker legal mobilization in the New York City metropolitan area.
 

Degrees and Education

Columbia University

Research Description

Darlène Dubuisson’s forthcoming book, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination, is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Port-au-Prince between 2013 and 2018. Haiti was once a beacon of Black liberatory futures, but now is often depicted as a place with no future where emigration is the only way out for most of its population. Reclaiming Haiti's Futures tells a different story. It is a story about two generations of Haitian scholars who returned home after particular crises to partake in social change. The first generation called "jenerasyon 86", were intellectuals who fled Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986).They returned after the regime fell to participate in the democratic transition through their political leadership and activism. The younger generation, dubbed the "jenn doktè," returned after the 2010 earthquake to partake in national reconstruction through public higher education reform. An ethnography of the future, the book explores how these returned scholars resisted coloniality's fractures and displacements by working toward and creating inhabitability or future-oriented places of belonging through improvisation, rasanblaj (assembly), and radical imagination. By centering on Haiti and the Caribbean, the book offers insights not just into the Haitian experience but also into how fractures have come to typify more aspects of life globally and what we might do about it.

Dr. Dubuisson's current research project examines how black transit migrants in Latin America create futures amid “anti-black immigration governmentality.” It also looks at how refugee and migrant rights organizations challenge anti-black racism and xenophobia in national contexts where the official discourse denies structural racism and/or the existence of a local Black population. This project will expand scholarship on Black geographies, global antiblackness, Black futurity, and new immigration control mechanisms. 

Courses

Anthropology of Crises and Futures 

Anthropology of Crises and Futures (Black Futures in the Anthropocene) reviews theories and approaches in studies of temporality, crises, and futures. We read texts in anthropology, cultural studies, feminist studies, and SF (science/speculative fiction), which examine the relationship between temporality, crises, and imagining/enacting better futures. Specifically, we put ethnographies of crises and disasters in conversation with SF within Afrofuturism and Afro-pessimism frameworks. This course’s central goal is to challenge students 1) to integrate various approaches to produce innovative questions about current and impending issues and 2) to interrogate their relationship to time and temporarily. Students are also encouraged craft anthropologically grounded audio, material, or visual speculative projects that seriously engage Black and Indigenous theorists.  

Black Feminist Ethnographies

The undergraduate seminar finds grounding in Black feminist praxis, which calls for integrating theory and practice toward dismantling intersecting systems of oppression. Specifically, Black feminist praxis seeks to “illuminate the experiences of [Black] women and theorize from the materiality of their lives to broader issues of political economy, family, representation, and transformation” (Mullings 1997, xi). Throughout the course, students will read ethnographies and watch ethnographic films by Black feminist anthropologists, as well as “try on” the methods outlined in these written and visual texts. The seminar will also show students how to employ Black feminist ethnography in their own research. This course will fulfill the methods requirement for anthropology majors.

Theorizing from Ex-Centric Sites: Graduate Seminar in Decolonial Anthropology

In a recent essay, anthropologist Faye Harrison (2016, 170) calls on anthropologists to theorize from "ex-centric sites"—"Southern" locations, "particularly the peripheral zones where critical intellectual trajectories have been sustained despite trends toward erasure." Taking up Harrison's call, this advanced graduate seminar engages decolonial theories advanced by scholars from Southern locations or peripheralized social groups. We will critically engage the works of scholars like Anibal Quijano, Amie Césaire, Christina Sharpe, David Scott, Faye Harrison, Franz Fanon, Jean Casimir, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter D. Mignolo, Catherine E. Walsh, Yanick Lahens, Valentine Y. Mudimbe, Ramón Grosfoguel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and others. We will also explore how these scholars' ideas and methods may inform how we engage our research praxis.

Publications

Dubuisson, D. (in press), Reclaiming Haiti's Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Dubuisson, D., Campos-Medina, P., Gleeson, S. and Griffith, K. L., (2023). Centering Race in Studies of Low-Wage Immigrant Labor. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 19 (1): 109-129. 

Dubuisson, D. (2023), “There Is a Real Generational Problem in This Country”: Haitian Intellectual Exile and Academic Diaspora Returns. Transforming Anthropology, 31(1): 3-14.

Dubuisson, D. (2022). The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence. Journal of Visual Culture 21(2), 255–276.

Dubuisson, D. (2022), Ethnography In-Sight and Sound: Rasanblaj and the Poetics of Creole Orality. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 27: 220-226.

Dubuisson, D. and Schuller, M. (2022), Beyond poto mitan: Challenging the “Strong Black Woman” archetype and allowing space for tenderness. Feminist Anthropology, 3: 60-74.

Dubuisson, D. (2022), The (State) University of Haiti: Toward a Place-Based Understanding of Kriz. PoLAR, 45: 8-25.

Dubuisson, D. (2022), "Haiti: Black Utopia." Hot Spots, Fieldsights, May 3. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/haiti-black-utopia.

Dubuisson, D. (2020/21), "We Know How to Work Together": Konbit, Protest, and the Rejection of INGO Bureaucratic Dominance. Journal of Haitian Studies 26 (2): 53-80.