Bio:
Darlène Dubuisson is an Assistant Professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Department of African American Studies. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research engages Black feminist theory, Black intellectual history, speculative fiction, apocalyptic anthropology, and migration and transnational studies. Her work traces how Black political thought, diasporic movements, and feminist praxis intersect to shape public life, focusing on the lived experiences and imaginative horizons of Black communities across the Americas. By combining ethnography, document analysis, and critical theory, she examines how people build solidarities and articulate futures in contexts marked by displacement, inequality, and state power. Her teaching centers community-engaged scholarship and collaborative, justice-oriented methods.
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, as part of the Press’s Critical Caribbean Studies series. An ethnography of the future, the book explores how two generations of Haitian returned intellectuals envisioned and sought to enact new worlds after crises. The book argues that these scholars resisted coloniality's fractures and displacements by working toward and creating inhabitability or future-oriented places of belonging through improvisation, rasanblaj (assembly), and radical imagination.
Dubuisson is also the co-author of the book Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace (RSF Press, 2025). Based on over 300 interviews with Haitian and Central American immigrant workers, the book illuminates how government regulation (and underregulation) degrades workplace conditions for immigrant workers of color as well as their ability to contest them. The book highlights how workers assert their own power, both individually and collectively, against undignified working conditions. Additionally, Dubuisson has authored or co-authored several research articles, published in various journals, including Current Anthropology, The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, The Journal of Visual Culture, and The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, among others.
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.
Education:
Dubuisson earned her PhD (2020) and MPhil (2018) Applied and Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She also holds an MA in International Educational Development from Teachers College, Columbia University (2012) and Bachelor's degree in English from Boston University (2009).
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 Kate 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.” 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.
