The European Studies Council presents
Madina Tlostanova, Professor, Linköping University.
“Postsoviet Tempolocalities and Possible Ways to Refuturing.”
Register here: https://bit.ly/SlavicColl-Apr6zoom
In this talk I will consider the complex tempolocalities of the non-European former colonies of Russia/USSR that are marked by the state socialist legacies as much as by the global coloniality. Intersections of post/neocolonial and postsoviet experience generate subjectivites and sensibilities that fall out of the conventional understanding of colonialism/postcolonialism and socialism/postsocialism. Such established frameworks still tend to overlook or misinterpret each other`s focal points and historical trajectories, while the postsoviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, to name just these two most obvious examples, present complex and dynamic cases of ethnic, religious, linguistic, racial, ideological, social and many other aspects of intersectionality. To better understand the entanglements of the postcolonial and postsoviet human conditions and spatial-temporal relations we need a separate optic that is already in the making but it is not always recognized either in the global North or in the global South due to the persistent modern/colonial divisions of intellectual labour. I argue that the postsocialist-postcolonial multi-layered tempolocalities with their specific embodied memories and re-existing potential, are promising spaces for decolonial refuturing, where redirective communities of change can be eventually nurtured. These communities would take into account the experience of the soviet and postsoviet modernity/coloniality and work for launching of the truly decolonial subjectivites, tempolocalities and “cosmotechnics”.
Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and fiction writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). Her research interests include decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, feminisms of the Global South, postsocialist human condition, fiction and art, critical future inquiries and critical interventions into complexity, crisis, and change. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A new Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020), Деколониальность бытия, знания и ощущения (Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing, in Russian, Centre of Contemporary Culture “Tselinny”, Kazakhstan, 2020) and the co-edited volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues. Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Routledge, 2021). Currently she is working on an experimental mixed media book Fictions of Unsettlement.