Black Feminist Ethnographies in Latin America and the Caribbean

Join us for an engaging joint-book discussion with Professors Darlène Dubuisson (University of California - Berkeley) and Prisca Gayles (University of Nevada - Reno) as they explore the intersecting themes of their recent books, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures (Rutgers University Press, 2024) and Pain into Purpose (Cambridge University Press, 2024), respectively. Through rich ethnographic research, the authors examine how Black intellectuals and activists resist colonial displacement and erasure to reclaim space, promote national belonging, and shape their futures. Dubuisson traces the journeys of Haitian intellectuals returning to rebuild their nation, while Gayles delves into Argentina’s Black resistance movement, highlighting the crucial role of Black women activists. Together, these books speak to broader global struggles for racial justice, belonging, and social transformation.

Dubisson and Gayles will be in conversation with Barnard’s Amelia Simone Herbert (Education and Urban Studies) and Maricarmen Hernandez (Sociology and Urban Studies).

For additional information, visit the event page here.

Accessibility

This event is free and open to the public. Live ASL interpretation will be provided. Registration is required.

We encourage attendees to wear masks when not speaking or eating. We will provide masks to any who need them.

Speakers

Prisca Gayles (University of Nevada - Reno) holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, with Doctoral Portfolios in African and African Diaspora Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, from UT- Austin. Dr. Gayles investigates the role of emotions in transnational Black social movements with a broader research goal of understanding the diverse ways that blackness is politicized across the African diaspora and used as a tool to demand racial justice in spaces of black invisibility. Her current book project, Pain into Purpose: Mobilizing Emotions in Argentina's Black Resistance Movement is a groundbreaking exploration of Argentina's Movimiento Negro (Black resistance movement). Employing a multi-year ethnography of Black political organizing, Prisca Gayles delves deep into the challenges activists face in confronting the erasure and denial of Argentina's Black past and present. She examines how collective emotions operate at both societal and interpersonal levels in social movements, arguing that activists strategically leverage societal and racialized emotions to garner support. Paying particular attention to the women activists who play a crucial role in leading and sustaining Argentina's Black organizations, the book showcases the ways Black women exercise transnational Black feminist politics to transform pain into purpose.

Dr. Gayles’s research and community-engaged work has received funding from the Tinker Foundation, The U.S. Fulbright Program, the Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellowship at Williams College, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Her research interests include Black Feminist Theory, Afro-Latin American feminisms, the sociology of race and ethnicity, Social movements, Migration and citizenship, and the African diaspora in Argentina.

Darlène Dubuisson is an Assistant Professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. Her research interests and teaching span political and legal anthropology, engaged and activist anthropology, Black feminist anthropology, Black intellectual histories, migration, transnational studies, and speculative fiction and visual culture. She focuses geographically on the Caribbean and Latin America.

Darlène Dubuisson’s recently published book, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination, is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Port-au-Prince between 2013 and 2018. Haiti was once a beacon of Black liberatory futures, but it is now often depicted as a place with no future, where emigration is the only way out for most of its population. 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 focusing on Haiti and the Caribbean, the book offers insights not only into the Haitian experience but also into how fractures have come to characterize more aspects of life globally and what we might do about it.

She is the co-author of the book Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace (with Kati L. Griffith, Shannon Gleeson, and Patricia Campos-Medina). She has also authored several articles published in journals such as Current Anthropology, The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, among others.

Dr. Dubuisson’s current research project examines how black transit migrants in Mexico engage practices of love and kin-work to forward futures despite transnational anti-black racism and xenophobia.

Amelia Simone Herbert is Assistant Professor of Education and Urban Studies at Barnard College. Her research and teaching draw on anthropology, comparative education, and Black studies to interrogate the roles that education plays in the construction and subversion of racialized urban inequality. Her current book project is an ethnography that examines how youth, families, and educators navigate the racial and spatial politics of aspiration in the increasingly marketized schooling landscape of Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to joining Barnard College, Amelia was a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and an instructor in the Department of Urban Education at Rutgers-Newark. She was also Visiting Assistant Professor in Colgate University’s Department of Educational Studies. Her commitment to researching the complex meanings of schooling in lived experiences is fueled by over 15 years of professional experience in K-12 schools. Amelia was a classroom teacher in Newark for nearly a decade and she has also worked as a teacher educator with schools in New York City and Cape Town. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Association of University Women, and the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation.

Maricarmen Hernandez is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Prior to joining Barnard, she was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. She has also held visiting positions at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO)- Quito and the Universidad Luis Vargas Torres- Esmeraldas. Hernández is a scholar of daily life in toxic places. Her work investigates the sociopolitical production of environmental inequalities as reflected in the uneven distribution of environmental harms and privileges. Focusing on daily practices of placemaking and interpretations of risk, she studies the processes that confine communities to hazardous living spaces. Using primarily ethnographic, qualitative, and archival methods, Maricarmen’s main areas of research are environmental inequality, urban marginality, political sociology, and studies of Latin America and Latinx communities. Her current research project is an ethnography of contaminated informal neighborhoods in the majority Afrodescendent city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Besides her work in Ecuador, Maricarmen has also conducted research in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border region, the Rio Grande Valley, and North Texas. Her work has been supported by Fulbright, National Science Foundation, American Association of University Women, Tinker Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Host or Publisher Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW)