Reclaiming Haiti's Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination

Darlène Elizabeth Dubuisson

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Reclaiming Haiti's Futures

Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination

Darlène Elizabeth Dubuisson

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2025

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About this book

Winner of the 2024 Annual Book Award from the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA)

Haiti was once a beacon of Black liberatory futures, but now it is often depicted as a place with no future where emigration is the only way out for most of its population. But Reclaiming Haiti's Futures tells a different story. It is a story about two generations of Haitian scholars who returned home after particular crises to partake in social change. The first generation, called jenerasyon 86, were intellectuals who fled Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship (1957–1986). They returned after the regime fell to participate in the democratic transition through their political leadership and activism. The younger generation, dubbed the jenn doktè, returned after the 2010 earthquake to partake in national reconstruction through public higher education reform. An ethnography of the future, the book explores how these returned 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. By centering on Haiti and the Caribbean, the book offers insights not just into the Haitian experience but also into how fractures have come to typify more aspects of life globally and what we might do about it.

Author / Editor information

DARLÈNE ELIZABETH DUBUISSON is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

"[A] deeply researched and beautifully argued work."

— Haiti Then and Now

"Reclaiming Haiti's Futures is a truly wonderful contribution to Caribbean Studies—a deeply meditative work of scholarship, suffused with care for the present, consideration of the past, and an urgency for a Caribbean future beyond our current neocolonial predicament."— Aaron Kamugisha, author of Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition

"Reclaiming Haiti's Futures stands as a courageous act of decoloniality and as a powerful reimagining of Haiti’s intellectual futures and societal structures. Dubuisson traces the history of the Haitian intelligentsia and calls upon local academics and returnees to work across fractures to create a stronger higher education system, a more robust civil society, and ultimately envision new democratic futures for Haiti and other nations of the Global South."
— Claudine Michel, professor emerita of Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara

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Frontmatter
i

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Contents
vii

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Preface
ix

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Note on the Text
xv

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Abbreviations
xvii

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Chronology
xix

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Introduction
1

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PART I Fractures
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1 Colonial Ruptures in the Caribbean and the Displacement of Haitian Intellectuals
23

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2 Internal Displacements: Tracing the Generational Aspects of Exile and Diasporic Homecomings
51

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3 The “Crisis Factory”: Improvising Place in the (State) University of Haiti
78

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PART II Sutures
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4 Rasanblaj: Assembly beyond Coloniality’s Fractures
101

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5 Imagining Emancipatory Caribbean Futures
126

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Coda
143

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Acknowledgments
149

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Notes
153

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References
163

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Index
187

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About the Author
193

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Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

December 11, 2024

eBook ISBN:

9781978837423

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978837423

eBook ISBN: 9781978837423

Keywords for this book

haiti; caribbean; politics; immigration; emigration; brain-drain; crisis; policy; diaspora; deportation; anthropology; jenerasyon 86; Duvalier dictatorship; Duvalier; jenn doktè; rasanblaj; 2010 earthquake; higher education; corruption

Audience(s) for this book

For universities and colleges of further and higher education

Reclaiming Haiti's Futures

Overview

About this book

Author / Editor information

Reviews

Topics

Table of contents

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Note on the Text

Abbreviations

Chronology

Introduction

1 Colonial Ruptures in the Caribbean and the Displacement of Haitian Intellectuals

2 Internal Displacements: Tracing the Generational Aspects of Exile and Diasporic Homecomings

3 The “Crisis Factory”: Improvising Place in the (State) University of Haiti

4 Rasanblaj: Assembly beyond Coloniality’s Fractures

5 Imagining Emancipatory Caribbean Futures

Coda

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

Bibliographic data