Unsettling Brazil

"In this work, Desirâee Poets posits that contemporary Brazil is a settler colony. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the book tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, Säao Paulo, and Belo Horizonte-two quilombos, two Indigenous movements, and a favela-to unravel the continuities and discontinuities of Brazil's settler colonial structure. As Poets argues, settler colonialism is renewed through expectations of Indigenous and quilombola authenticity as well as through militarization, incarceration, genocide, and marginalization that continuously attempt to dispossess and eliminate Black and Indigenous peoples from the political landscape, including in its urban centers. Placing these dynamics under one analytic lens, Poets navigates how the dependent settler capitalist state has related to different Indigenous and Black groups with distinct yet interrelated effects. She thereby challenges the still-common separation of Black and Indigenous politics and peoples in policy, activism, and scholarship. Building on the work of Black and Indigenous organizers and thinkers from Brazil and beyond, she makes the case for an intersectional and transnational lens that centers the intellectual, political, and creative labor of Black and Indigenous peoples. The book foregrounds their resistances to settler capitalism and dependency. Common themes in Brazilian and Latin American studies emerge, and Poets's theoretical contributions are relevant to other countries. They also invigorate a dialogue between North America and South America. The powerful narrative will be invaluable to scholars and students of Brazil and Latin America and encourage an imagining of decolonial strategies in both hegemonic and peripheral settler colonial contexts around the globe"--