Bio:
Darlène Dubuisson is an assistant professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies. A sociocultural anthropologist, Dubuisson’s research engages Black feminist theory, Black intellectual history, speculative fiction, apocalyptic anthropology, and migration and transnational studies. Her work examines how Black intellectual thought, migration, and feminist praxis intersect to shape public life, with a focus on the lived experiences and imaginative horizons of Black communities across the Americas, with an emphasis on Haiti and the Caribbean.
In 2022, Dubuisson received a Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship to support the completion of her first book, “Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination,” which was published in December 2024 by Rutgers University Press. The book received the 2024 SLACA (Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology) Annual Book Prize. In addition, Dubuisson co-authored Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-wage Workplace, published in 2025 by Russell Sage Foundation Press.
Her current research project concerns how Black transit migrants in Mexico engage practices of love and kin-work to forward futures amid transnational anti-Blackness and xenophobia. Beyond her scholarship, Dubuisson is an immigrant rights advocate and serves as an expert witness for Haitian asylum cases in the United States.
Dubuisson earned her Ph.D. in Applied and Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University in October 2020. She also holds a master’s in International Education Development from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a bachelor’s in English from Boston University.
Selected Publications:
Books
2024, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical ImaginationNew Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
2025, Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-wage Workplace. (with Kati Griffith, Shannon Gleeson, and Patricia Campos-Medina). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation Press.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
2025, “Kin-Work among Black Transit Migrants in Tapachula, Mexico: Tracing Acts of Love against Anti-Black Immigration Governmentality.” Current Anthropology, 66 (1):135-140
2023, “Centering Race in Studies of Low-Wage Immigrant Labor.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 19: 12.1–12.21
2023, “‘There Is a Real Generational Problem in this Country’: Haitian Intellectual Exile and Academic Diaspora Returns.” Transforming Anthropology, 31:3-14.
2022, “Haiti: Black Utopia.” Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights, May 3.
2022, “The Haitian zombie motif: Against the banality of antiblack violence.” Journal of Visual Culture, 21(2), 255-276.
2022, “Ethnography In-Sight and Sound: Rasanblaj and the Poetics of Creole Orality.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 27: 220-226.
2022, “Beyond Poto Mitan: Challenging the ‘Strong Black Woman’ Archetype and Allowing Space for Tenderness.” (with Mark Schuller). Feminist Anthropology, 3:60-74.
2022, “The (State) University of Haiti: Toward a Place-Based Understanding of Kriz” POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 45: 8-25.
2021, “‘We Know How to Work Together’: Konbit, Protest, and the Rejection of INGO Bureaucratic Dominance.” Journal of Haitian Studies 26 (2): 53-80.
Book Chapters
2025, “Migration and Labour Organisation.” (with Campos Medina, Patricia, Shannon Gleeson, and Kati Griffith) in Research Handbook on Social Policy and Employment, edited by Elke Heins, Zoe Irving, Gaby Ramia, and Ricardo Velázquez Leyer. Camberley, UK: Edward Elgar Publisher.
