Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art

"Madina Tlostanova's Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art is a bold and timely account of why any critical understanding of the postsocialist condition and its relationship to the postcolonial world must contend with Soviet modernity as a twin (if failed) project of Western modernity. This immaculately researched engagement with the art, fiction, cinema and theater of the former Soviet Union and the ex-Soviet colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus demonstrates the breathtaking range of subversive and emancipatory practices that have created a decolonial "community of sense." By centering on decolonial aesthesis a part of the world that has been neglected in much of the existing literature on postcolonialism and postsocialism, Tlostanova has made a vital contribution to how we understand global coloniality and decolonial praxis." (Neda Atanasoski, Associate Professor, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California Santa Cruz, USA)

This book tackles the intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries and sensibilities focusing on the ways they are reflected in contemporary art, fiction, theater and cinema.This book tackles the intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries and sensibilities focusing on the ways they are reflected in contemporary art, fiction, theater and cinema.  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, 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. The monograph focuses on the aesthetic principles and mechanisms of sublime, the postsocialist/postcolonial decolonization of museums, the perception and representation of space and time through the tempolocalities of post-dependence, the anatomy of characters-tricksters with shifting multiple identities, the memory politics of the post-traumatic conditions and ways of their overcoming.