What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?: Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire

by Madina Tlostanova

In What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates this human condition. Observing how the concept of the happy future—which was at the core of the project of Soviet modernity—has lapsed from the post-Soviet imagination, Tlostanova shows how the possible way out of such a sense of futurelessness lies in the engagement with activist art. She interviews artists, art collectives, and writers such as Estonian artist Liina Siib, Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, and Azerbaijani writer Afanassy Mamedov who frame the post-Soviet condition through the experience and expression of community, space, temporality, gender, and negotiating the demands of the state and the market. In foregrounding the unfolding aesthesis and activism in the post-Soviet space, Tlostanova emphasizes the important role that decolonial art plays in providing the foundation upon which to build new modes of thought and a decolonial future.

Genres: Russia, Nonfiction, Art

160 pages, Paperback

Published July 19, 2018

About the author

MADINA TLOSTANOVA is a trans-diasporic scholar with mixed ethnic origins (Circassian, Tatar, Uzbek) born and living in Moscow but extensively teaching, publishing and doing research abroad. She is a professor of philosophy at the School of public policy of the Russian presidential academy of national economy and public administration in Moscow (since 2012). Previously she worked for 9 years as a professor of philosophy and cultural studies at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. In 1997-2003 she was employed as a senior researcher at Gorky Institute of World Literature (Russian Academy of Sciences). Trained in Moscow State University as an American Studies major focusing on US Southern fiction, she gradually drifted to multiculturalism (on which her doctoral dissertation was focused) and transcultural aesthetics to finally shift to post/decolonial interpretation of the post-soviet space, subjectivities, literature and the arts. Today Tlostanova’s interests focus around a critique of modernity/coloniality from a decolonial perspective and conceptualizing the post-soviet cultural imaginary and political society in the changing world.
Tlostanova has studied, taught and conducted research in several universities in the USA - University of Mississippi as a graduate student (1992-1993), Middlebury College as an instructor at the Russian language summer school (1996-1997), Duke University, as a scholar-in-residence at the Institute of International and Interdisciplinary Studies (2007-2008); and in Europe – University of Bremen, Germany, as a visiting professor through DAAD (2006, 2011); Linkoping University, Sweden, as a scholar in residence at the excellence center GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (2013), etc. From 2002 she has been a member of the international decolonial collective, and participated in a number of conferences, exhibitions, and publications organized by this group.
Tlostanova has authored the following books: Multicultural Discourse and Late 20th Century US Fiction (Moscow, Nasledie: 2000, in Russian), Post-soviet Literature and the Aesthetics of Transculturation (Moscow: URRS, 2004, in Russian), From the Philosophy of Multiculturalism to the Philosophy of Transculturation (New York: Northern Cross, 2008, in Russian), Decolonial Gender Epistemologies (Moscow: Maska, 2009, in Russian), The Sublime of Globalization? Sketches on Trans-cultural Subjectivity and Aesthetics (Moscow: URRS, 2005, in English), Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (N.Y., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, in English) and Learning to Unlearn. Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012, co-authored with Walter Mignolo). Currently she is working on a book on decolonial aesthesis in the post-soviet space tentatively entitled Unbinding the Imaginary: the Postsoviet (Absent Actor) in the Transmodern World.

Reviews

[Daria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even for someone who is not into contemporary post-Soviet art, the introduction is worth reading to better understand the dynamics behind Russia and the space of its former empire.

[GreyAtlas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too short and not in-depth to even begin discussion of the question. Read more like a TV interview on a 5 minute segment than an actual research work.