UC Berkeley Professor Darlène Dubuisson found ‘liberation’ in reading. It led her to study how Black people imagine better futures

Darlène Dubuisson is the newest faculty member in UC Berkeley’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. In this first-person narrative, she shares how her unconventional educational path ultimately led her to her current field of study at Berkeley.

My academic story is a strange one. 

Before college, I had not been taught by a teacher in a classroom since the first grade. My mother was an immigrant from Haiti, and we were a single-parent, working-class household of four living in Boston. But my mother was determined to give her kids a good education, which for her meant sending us to private school. The only one she could afford was, as it would turn out, an independent fundamentalist Baptist church school. 

At this school, you sat in a cubicle by yourself, with your back to everyone else, and taught yourself from booklets and checked your own work. What you did not learn from these booklets, you learned from the daily sermons and interactions with the teachers who supervised your self-study. 

We students were taught Black racial inferiority. We were prohibited from listening to music with beats to it — anything that was considered “Black music.” The choir director explained that these rules were because my African ancestors had used drums to worship the devil. It was even insinuated that the chattel slavery of African peoples was part of God’s plans — the curse of Ham. 

We were also taught the inferiority of women to men. Women weren’t allowed to wear pants, and their only appropriate careers were as a pastor’s wife, a missionary, a grade-school teacher or perhaps a nurse. When I was 11, we had a career day and I showed up dressed like a writer — with a typewriter and everything. My teachers discouraged this aspirational career path.

I effectively lived in two worlds: One was white, ultra-right-wing and ultra-conservative, where Black and brown people were read as in need of “saving.” And the other was Black, Haitian and culturally rich and religiously diverse.

I questioned the teachings I received at the church school very early on. In my early teens, I found a book at the local bookstore: Breath, Eyes, Memory, by a young Haitian woman named Edwidge Danticat. That book changed my life. It was the first time I read a book by a Black author other than Booker T. Washington. It was also the first time I ever saw myself and any version of my story in a book’s pages. One of my teachers tried confiscating it from me at school. That’s when I realized that there’s something powerful and subversive about seeking out knowledge that isn’t sanctioned. So I kept at it.

I graduated at 16 years old and decided I would go to college at an HBCU. I withdrew in my first year due in part to a major death in the family. I then moved to Florida to help support my family. There, I enrolled at a Bible college. My experience at that college left me further disillusioned, and I left after a semester or two.

I moved back to Boston, and I decided that whatever I would do next, it would have to be in complete contrast to what I had known. I moved into an apartment with a bunch of self-proclaimed “hippies” in inner-city Boston and shared a room with a young woman, Skye, who rocked a shaved head. I lived with many different roommates, people of different genders, sexualities and beliefs, people whom I had been told were heathens and sinners. These notions of “otherness” I’d been taught created a false sense of us-versus-them. I resolved to unlearn these ideas, along with those that I was somehow less-than because of my race and gender.

At 19, I enrolled full-time at Boston University and majored in English, with the goal of becoming a novelist like Edwidge Danticat. I also worked two jobs to pay for school: one at the bank and the other at a café. During that time, I read voraciously, devouring everything from Toni Morrison to Alice Walker to Chinua Achebe. After all, one of the most valuable skills I had gained at that church school was self-study. I was really in awe of my own liberation through this self-study.

When I graduated from college, I thought I would teach in Senegal. The elementary school where I hoped to work wanted me to teach English. It was a French-medium school when most of the students had grown up speaking Wolof. 

What I witnessed in Senegal was similar to what I had seen in travel to Haiti and Jamaica: a colonial education model that seemed to undermine local knowledge systems. My experience at the church school was part of a larger trend, where people were being educated away from themselves — their heritage and cultures. 

I thought, “I need to figure out how to decolonize education.” This led me to pursue graduate education at Columbia under the supervision of Professor George C. Bond, an anthropologist of Africa who researched and taught Black intellectual and political thought. My own research would follow in his legacy.

In the first year of my doctoral studies, I was a researcher on a project looking at the role of Haitian diaspora academics in national rebuilding after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. My work on this project would lead to my dissertation research, which focused both on exiled intellectuals who returned after the fall of the 29-year Duvalier dictatorship as well as diaspora scholars who returned after the earthquake. These returned scholars sought to participate in bringing about new futures in Haiti. The earlier group generally focused their efforts on political activism and leadership, and the later group on public higher education reform. 

My dissertation research included long-term fieldwork in Port-au-Prince. As part of this fieldwork, I taught at the State University of Haiti at a time when it was being occupied by state police in response to widespread student protests. In 1987, after the fall of Duvalier, Haiti enshrined academic freedom in its constitution. The dictatorship had persecuted and killed intellectual dissidents and activists, forcing many into exile. So, academic freedom was seen as necessary to Haiti’s democratic transition. During fieldwork, I experienced the State University’s constitutional autonomy being eroded in real-time. I also witnessed professors advocating on the behalf of students being expelled because of their protests. I started that project in 2013. It would take until 2025 for many aspects of this research to hit home for me. 

Rutgers University Press

My first book, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures, is based on my dissertation. It discusses how Haitian scholars who returned home in the aftermath of crises worked to create futures beyond the legacies of colonialism. You know, a few months back, I gave a book talk at Barnard College and Edwidge Danticat was in the audience. She bought a copy of my book. That idea that she is now reading my work is incredible.

My research now is in Mexico, with Black refugees, Africans and Haitians. As an ethnographer, I try to find a useful role in the community with whom I am working. In 2022, I worked as a community organizer with an organization serving Black refugees. I witnessed how many refugees operated in love despite contexts of violence and death. Women and men engaged in care work and people celebrated the creation of new life and relationships. I am curious about these everyday acts of future-making in the middle of the most dire of circumstances.  

In short, my work explores the relationship between crises and futures, centering on everyday and imaginative practices of people of the African diaspora. More broadly, I think about moments when there is this collective feeling that things will change for the better for marginalized peoples. What do we do when they don’t? How do we continue to try to create futures in the wake of ever-unfolding crises?