Darlene Elizabeth Dubuisson

DARLENE DUBUISSON, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid writing and research on “Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination.” This book traces the experiences of Haitian scholars who returned to Haiti from North America, Western Europe, and Latin America to participate in social transformation. Based on multi-voiced ethnography in Port-au-Prince, the book describes the homecomings and placemaking of two generations of returned scholars. These two generations are locally referred to as jenerasyon 86 (the 1986 generation), intellectual exiles of the Duvalier dictatorship era (1957-1986), and jenn doktè (literally, young doctorates), the younger academics who returned after the 2010 Haitian earthquake. An ethnography of the future, ”Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures” argues that extant fractures in Haiti and the Caribbean—the consequences of coloniality and its myriad manifestations—contributed to the displacement of jenerasyon 86 and the jenn doktè and simultaneous crises in the Haitian public university system. Its central claim is that these returned scholars nonetheless created inhabitability or future-oriented places of belonging within and beyond Haitian academe through improvisation, rasanblaj (a Haitian term invoking assembly, gathering, compilation (Ulysse 2017)), and radical imagination. The author concludes that Haiti and the Caribbean, as “ex-centric” sites of theorization (Harrison 2016), allow an appreciation of how fractures have come to typify more aspects of life globally and insights into what we might do about it.