Darlène Dubuisson

  • Assistant Professor

Darlène Dubuisson received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2020. Her research interests and teaching span political and legal anthropology, activist and engaged anthropology, Black feminist anthropology, Black intellectual histories, migration and transnational studies, and speculative fiction and visual culture.

Her work weaves together 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.

Education & Training

  • Columbia University

Representative Publications

Dubuisson, Darléne (forthcoming) “‘There Is a Real Generational Problem in this Country’: Haitian Intellectual Exile and Academic Diaspora Returns.” Transforming Anthropology.

Dubuisson, Darlène (2020) “We Know How to Work Together': Konbit, Protest, and the Rejection of INGO Bureaucratic Dominance."  Journal of Haitian Studies 26, no. 2: 53-80. doi:10.1353/jhs.2020.0012

Dubuisson, Darléne (forthcoming) "The (State) University of Haiti: Toward a Place-based Understanding of Kriz." PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Dubuisson, Darlene and Schuller, Mark (2021) “Beyond Poto Mitan: Challenging the "Strong Black Woman" Archetype and Allowing Space for Tenderness.” Feminist Anthropology. doi:10/1002.fea2.12065

Research Interests

Darlène Dubuisson’s current book project, Place-Making in a Fractured Academic Landscape, is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Port-au-Prince between 2013 and 2018. The book explores Haitian intellectual exile and academic diaspora homecomings after two would-be moments of social transformation in Haiti: post-Duvalier (1986-) and post-earthquake (2010-). The book argues that despite their internal displacement—the result of global and local fissures—returnees created "place" within and beyond Haiti's fractured academic landscape through a habitus of improvisation, rasanblaj (compilation, assembly), and imagination. The book extends theories and research on returned migrations, the anthropology of intellectuals, and the emergent anthropologies of crises and futures. It also pursues fundamental anthropological questions of displacement, home, and place through the stories and experiences of returned scholars across three decades.

Professor Dubuisson's next research project will explore new Black geographies through Haitian migration in South America. The project will examine how migrants create futures amid antiblack immigration practices and global crises. It will also look at how refugee and migrant rights organizations challenge antiblack racism and xenophobia in national contexts where the official discourse denies structural racism and the existence of a local Black population. This project will expand scholarship on Black geographies, global antiblackness, Black futurity, and new immigration control mechanisms amid crises.