Desirée Poets

Desirée Poets is assistant professor of postcolonial theory at the Department of Political Science and a core faculty of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) PhD Program. Through ethnographically informed, critical, and collaborative methods, Poets has been working with urban Indigenous, favela, and maroon (in Portuguese, quilombola) communities and movements in Brazil’s Southeast Region since 2013. Her research focuses on settler colonial, postcolonial, and dependency theories in Latin America; urban (de-)militarization; arts, collective memory and community change, and questions of gender, ethnicity, class, and race. 

Poets’ manuscript, Unsettling Brazil, develops the notion of militarized dependent settler capitalism, the interdependent internal and external structures within, against, and beyond which urban Black and Indigenous struggles in Brazil take place. Poets asks: What does it mean to talk about decolonization in a settler context marked by dependent capitalism? Staying with this question, Poets’ work has turned to community-produced arts and collective memory practices as sites that move beyond the limits of critique and offer some direction in the journey toward decolonization. She is a co-curator of the Maré from the Inside physical and virtual art exhibit, and co-principal investigator of a research lab on community art, memory, and development in Rio de Janeiro.