This article examines the historical, structural, and embodied aspects of the 2016–2018 crisis at the Université d’État d'Haïti (State University of Haiti, UEH) to contextualize and disrupt a conventional notion of “Haitian perpetual crisis.” The article first discusses various approaches to the ongoing crises in Haiti. It specifically highlights Beckett's conceptualization of kriz (embodied crisis) and uses articulation and embodied spaces to forward a place‐based understanding of kriz. It next examines transnational processes, which articulate UEH as a “crisis factory” by constituting it as a state‐nonstate entity located in a yellow zone (meaning, a site of insecurity). The embodied space thus creates affective uncertainty for individuals. In the final section, the article uses a composite narrative to retell the story of the UEH crisis from 2016 to 2018. It also draws on fieldwork at three UEH faculties (schools) to trace kriz through the affective experiences and embodied practices of UEH students, professors, and administrators. This article argues that the UEH crisis was a manifestation of the so‐called crisis factory articulation that geographically situated bodies incorporated and reified through a habitus of improvisation. It concludes that this improvisation may also provide a way out of future crises—to the extent that improvisers can coalesce around a shared vision of the future that can drive systemic change.

In this article, we contend that the “strong Black woman” archetype constricts expressions of Black womanhood and girlhood and thus limits individual and collective liberation. We maintain that strength need not preclude tenderness, highlighting two forms: wounded tenderness—a raw and aching feeling pointing to the vulnerability of human beings—and liberated tenderness, a practice of meeting woundedness with embodied awareness and gentleness. We foreground the concept of poto mitan to illustrate how the “strong Black woman” archetype upholds virtues of strength at the expense of tenderness, thus taking up Faye Harrison's call to theorize from “ex‐centric sites.” Translated as “center posts,” poto mitan describes the architecture of spaces for traditional ancestor worship and conventionally refers to Haitian women's central role as pillars of the family and community. We begin this article by discussing the limits of this discourse within feminist scholarship and activism. Second, we examine how this discourse both engenders and limits liberation for Haitian rural women. By concluding with “tenderness as method,” we argue that feminist anthropologists working with Black women must not only attune themselves to how discourses and performances of strength may occlude liberation but also call on our own vulnerability to allow space for liberated tenderness.

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Based on a series of life‐history interviews conducted between 2013 and 2018, this article examines the generational aspects of homecomings, or how location and temporality affect intellectual return and reintegration. The article specifically explores the returns of Haitian intellectual exiles (jenerasyon 86) and the young academic diaspora (jenn doktè) at two would‐be moments of social transformation in Haiti: post‐Duvalier (after 1986) and post‐earthquake (after 2010). First, it discusses how populism and political uprooting (dechoukaj) led to the internal exile or social displacement of jenerasyon 86. Next, it examines academic diaspora returns in the era of the neoliberal university and outlines the intergenerational struggles that emerged between jenerasyon 86 and the jenn doktè. This article argues that generation as both social position and sociohistorical context created divergent experiences of placelessness for returnees and that the lack of intellectual friendship among returnees contributed to their inability to realize their aspirations of social change.

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