Our August 2025 Departmental Spotlight features our newest faculty member, Assistant Professor, Darlène Dubuisson, interviewed by Graduate Student Endria Richardson.
Who do you love? Writers, thinkers, artists, parents, friends—who has inspired you to be in the world the way that you are?
What a delightful question. I love my two boys, partner, and myself, of course. I also love my small group of dear friends—strong, intelligent women who treat me with sisterly (and sometimes motherly) care despite being so far away, in different states, countries, and time zones. I love nature-lovers, people who get dirt under their nails, lie on the grass, and propagate plants from discarded cuttings. I love those who create opportunities to gather around a well-prepared meal and good, or even cheap, wine (some wine can be both). I love those who love, love, and who practice creating expansive spaces of belonging as if it were a religion, a sacred duty. I love the artists, healers, thinkers, activists, writers, musicians, cooks, quilters, and creators of all kinds. Some of my favorite creators include Edwidge Danticat, Frida Kahlo, Kendrick Lamar, Lauryn Hill, Tessa Mars, and Leyla McCalla. I really love elders. I love those who love without condition or expectation while remaining measured and discerning. Who inspired me to show up as I do? An earlier version of myself, the Buddha, my friend Elaine, various matriarchs, my partner, and my sons.
Where do you come from? Is there a place that feels like home?
Where do I come from: the universe, like everything else. But I was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts, and spent my early adulthood in New York. My roots, however, are Haitian. I never really felt at ease in Massachusetts; New York was a much better fit for me. I have felt at home in Haiti. I imagine making a home there one day. I am, after all, a "homemaker." Or I practice making “home” where I can. Places that feel most like home, then, are the spaces I curate to hold and nurture me—places with the right mix of books, art, plants, people, smells, lighting, and sounds (chatter, music, ambient hums).
What are you reading (or watching, or listening to) lately?
I am always reading for research, but outside of that, I strive to read at least one scholarly work and one novel at a time. Currently, I am reading Kaiama L. Glover’s A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, and I am nearing the final pages of Myriam Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder. I also started Christen Smith’s Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil. I have read Octavia Butler’s Parables every year for the past three years, but I haven't picked it up yet for 2025. My ten-year-old son suggests I read Nnedi Okorafor’s Nsibidi Scripts series. He’s already halfway through the second book and says it has all the things I like, “such as culture,” in his words. I recently picked up a book by Derrida that I hadn’t heard of before, “The Ear of the Other.” I found it in Oakland at Clio's, this hip bar-bookstore. The books there are organized according to the history of thought rather than by genre. I plan to use the Derrida book for an article I'm working on.
I listen to a wide range of music, depending on my mood and the time of day—lately, it has been Hozier, Giveon, and Sampha. I've been rewatching The Good Place. My streaming is light – reruns of old sitcoms, Bob's Burgers, and Abbott Elementary.
What are your meaningful pursuits outside of teaching/writing/researching? What do you do for fun, or to relax?
Meaningful pursuits outside of teaching/writing/researching: parenting two boys. Although parenting often intersects with my work as an academic. My oldest son sometimes dislikes this intersection. For fun and relaxation, I enjoy hiking, biking, yoga, aimless walking, boutique window shopping, and dancing to Reggaeton and Afrobeats.
In times of war, genocide, and fascism, what is the purpose of the kind of learning, teaching, and supporting that we do in academia? How do you understand the role of the university in politics and activism?
I have been grappling with these questions since my graduate studies, and they play a significant role in shaping my dissertation and first book. My answers to these questions are a large part of why I chose to leave the Anthropology Department at the University of Pittsburgh and join the Black Studies Department here at UC Berkeley. In short, I believe that our role as academics and intellectuals—particularly in times of fascism, genocide, and normalized violence—is to “speak the truth to power,” as Edward Said put it. To quote Said (1996, 97) more completely, “[F]or the contemporary intellectual living at a time that is already confused by the disappearance of what seem to have been objective moral norms and sensible authority, is it acceptable simply either blindly to support the behavior of one’s own country and overlook its crimes or to say rather supinely, ‘I believe they all do it, and that’s the way of the world?' What we must be able to say instead is that intellectuals are not professionals denatured by their fawning service to an extremely flawed power, but—to repeat—are intellectuals with an alternative and more principled stand that enables them in effect to speak the truth to power.” In times like these, our work is maintaining “an alternative and more principled stand” to speak and act against fascist hate, racist policing, and senseless violence targeting the most vulnerable among us. We must hold those in power accountable, which, admittedly, becomes increasingly challenging when they control the funding. Higher education institutions, as we know, have been co-opted by a capitalist logic that prioritizes the accumulation of capital over the improvement of lives, that promotes a doctrine of scarcity rather than an ethos of abundance. What is the role of the university? Ideally, it is to create conditions for developing alternative and more principled perspectives, to safeguard and defend academic freedom, and to model radical inclusion and belonging. To that end, the university must reevaluate its sources of funding. Those of us operating in the vein of the Black radical tradition recognize that our work must also extend beyond the university, connecting struggles for liberation in our communities to similar struggles elsewhere. I close with this quote from Said (1996, 44): “For the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the sufferings of others.”