Professor Darlène Dubuisson (Anthropology, UC Berkeley) will give a talk on her book, Reclaiming Haiti's Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination. 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.

Dubuisson's book 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.

This event is part of the "Haiti: Past, Present, and Futures" event series organized by Professor Rachel Jean-Baptiste (History and African & African American Studies).