What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? : Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Sovi [Paperback]

InWhat 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.

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.

Madina Tlostanova is Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden, and the author of several books, most recently,Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence.

“In this provocative and poignant book Madina Tlostanova expands her examination of the melancholia of postsocialist peoples as ‘problem people’ facing the ‘void’ of where to go when material conditions have collapsed amid the intensity of lived experience, of sensing, feeling the, in a word,aesthesisof scarred temporality. The paradox of imagination, embodied in fiction and art, is the proverbial leap, without preordainedl£¦