Darlene Elizabeth Dubuisson

This book traces the experiences of Haitian intellectuals and scholars who returned to Haiti to participate in social transformation. These returnees, from countries like France, Canada, the US, Belgium, Mexico, and Brazil, are a sizeable and diverse group. Given the dearth of graduate programs in Haiti, most Haitians with advanced degrees have studied and lived abroad. The book uses multivoiced ethnography and multiscaled analysis to describe the homecomings and placemaking of two generations of returned intellectuals. These two generations are locally referred to as jenerasyon 86 (the 1986 generation)’intellectual exiles of the Duvalier dictatorship era, and jenn dokt’ (literally, young doctorates)’the younger academics who returned after the 2010 earthquake. The book argues that fractures in Haiti’s higher education system’the results of the fragmented globality’contributed to the internal displacement of returned intellectuals and ongoing crises in the public university system. The manuscript’s central argument is that returned intellectuals nonetheless created place within and across Haiti’s fractured academe through improvisation, rasanblaj (a uniquely Haitian term invoking creative compilation and assembly), and radical imagination. The book thus provides an analytical framework for understanding how people work within and across fractures to create future-oriented places of belonging.