Madina Tlostanova is a Professor of Postcolonial Feminism at the Department of Thematic Studies (Gender Studies) at Linköping University, Sweden. The author of eight scholarly books, over 250 articles and two postcolonial novels, Tlostanova focuses on non-Western gender theory, contemporary art, alter-globalism, decolonial and postcolonial theory, and postsocialist studies. Her most recent books are Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflection from Eurasia and the Americas (co-authored with Walter Mignolo, Ohio State University Press, 2012). She has just finished a book Postcolonialism and postsocialism in fiction and arts: resistance and re-existence (under the contract with Palgrave Macmillan).
From Resistance to Re-existence: postcolonial /postsocialist junctures and decolonial options
Abstract
After the defeat of the Socialist modernity the postsocialist space and its people have found themselves in the void. Many elements of the former Second world experience, echo the postcolonial situations and sensibilities, including subalternization, epistemic racism, mimicry, unhomedness and transit, the revival of ethnic nationalisms and neo-imperial narratives, neo-Orientalist and mutant Eurocentric tendencies, indirect forms of resistance and life-asserting modes of re-existence. Yet there are also untranslatable differences between the postcolonial and the postsocialist human conditions. I will address how these intersections and opacities are reflected in contemporary art, fiction, theater and cinema of the postsocialist spaces from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.
