Madina Tlostanova

Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates the post-Soviet human condition through analyses of art and through interviews with artists and writers, showing the important role that radical art plays in building new modes of thought and a decolonial future.

Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire

What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present époque. The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement, and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites us to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing. Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current époque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies, and posthumanities.

Being Out-of-joint as a Generative Human Condition

Narratives of Unsettlement

Redi Koobak

Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

Through staging dialogues between scholars, activists, and artists from a variety of disciplinary, geographical, and historical specializations, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues explores the possible resonances and dissonances between the postcolonial and the postsocialist in feminist theorizing and practice. While postcolonial and postsocialist perspectives have been explored in feminist studies, the two analytics tend to be viewed separately. This volume brings together attempts to understand if and how postcolonial and postsocialist dimensions of the human condition - historical, existential, political, and ideological - intersect and correlate in feminist experiences, identities, and struggles. In the three sections that probe the intersections, opacities, and challenges between the two discourses, the authors put under pressure what postcolonialism and postsocialism mean for feminist scholarship and activism. The contributions address the emergence of new political and cultural formations as well as circuits of bodies and capital in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era in currently re-emerging neo-colonial and imperial conflicts. They engage with issues of gender, sexuality, race, migration, diasporas, indigeneity, and disability, while also developing new analytical tools such as postsocialist precarity, queer postsocialist coloniality, uneventful feminism, feminist opacity, feminist queer crip epistemologies. The collection will be of interest for postcolonial and postsocialist researchers, students of gender studies, feminist activists and scholars.

Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice

Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues

Tony Fry

The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large. The authors make clear that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the complexity of the combined critical conditions that are now putting life on Earth at risk, and the divisions and theories of knowledge that are dominantly and instrumentally trying to understand the situation. In response, this work makes the case for the need for a new political imagination that rejects the sufficiency of existing political ideologies (including democracy) being the end point of politics. The book tackles the political underpinnings of social and economic life in a world still embedded in the inequities of the afterlife of colonialism and state socialism. Thereafter it engages narratives of change, rethinks imagination and critical practices, to finally present a relationally connected way to move forward. This trans-disciplinary volume is directed at those working in political philosophy and epistemology, critical global and security studies, decoloniality and postcolonial studies, design, critical anthropology and the post humanities. It is accessible to both academic audiences and activists and practitioners.

Madina Tlostanova

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