In this interview, Manuela Boatcă discusses the challenges posed by and the ambiguities involved in the terms “postsocialist” and “postcolonial”, their relationship to different feminisms and unequal Europes, and their connection to multiple processes and forms of racialization in the modern/colonial world-system. Through the category of “uneasy postcolonialisms”, Manuela Boatcă addresses how the coloniality of knowledge relegates certain experiences to certain spaces and assigns them a category. She argues that dismantling the categories thus constructed – from the First, Second, and Third Worlds to “Eastern” Europe, “Latin America”, and whiteness, is indispensable for the emergence of transversal coalitions.

Are feminist coalitions magical enough to survive and endure while questioning and shaking the colonial/racist foundations of Swedish academic knowledge production and the overall Swedish society? Can feminist bridging and collective writing remain a magical process even when grappling with difficult experiences and memories of othering and racialisation? This is a creatively and collectively written article on feminist coalition building, and its importance in thinking, articulating and deconstructing race, racialization and racist structures. More than two years ago, seven interdisciplinary gender studies scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origins, came together to explore our differently situated experiences of disidentifying with Swedish academia and society in a collective we call Loving Coalitions. Against the background of Swedish exceptionalism, historical amnesia of Sweden’s colonial past and present, and the deafening silence on Swedish whiteness and racism, we are sharing our poems, letters, texts and testimonies of racist interactions in Swedish academia and society. While doing so, we discuss how moving away from conventional ways of doing research and experimenting with creative methodological alternatives, such as automatic writing, epistolary formats, poems, fiction, collective memory-work, allow us to acknowledge and embrace our different life backgrounds and academic trajectories as a mode of knowledge production. We hope and believe that our experiences, refl ections and ways to resist racism and Othering in Sweden and Swedish academia through alternative coalition building, based on mutual care and love, can be relevant in a Danish context as well.

Through staging dialogues between scholars, activists and artists from a variety of disciplinary, geographical and historical specializations, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues explores the possible resonances and dissonances between the postcolonial and the postsocialist in feminist theorizing and practice. While postcolonial and postsocialist perspectives have been explored in feminist studies, the two analytics tend to be viewed separately. This volume brings together attempts to understand if and how postcolonial and postsocialist dimensions of the human condition - historical, existential, political, and ideological - intersect and correlate in feminist experiences, identities, and struggles. In the three sections that probe the intersections, opacities and challenges between the two discourses, the authors put under pressure what postcolonialism and postsocialism mean for feminist scholarship and activism. The contributions address the emergence of new political and cultural formations as well as circuits of bodies and capital in post-Cold War and postcolonial era in currently re-emerging neo-colonial and imperial conflicts. They engage with issues of gender, sexuality, race, migration, diasporas, indigeneity, and disability, while also developing new analytical tools such as postsocialist precarity, queer postsocialist coloniality, uneventful feminism, feminist opacity, feminist queer crip epistemologies. The collection will be of interest for postcolonial and postsocialist researchers, students of gender studies, feminist activists and scholars

This interview centres around three themes: a) anti-colonial and nationalist convergences and disjunctures; b) the tensions between feminism and nationalism and inherent contradictions within Indian feminism and c) knowledge economies. Despite the mass presence of women in every kind of anti-imperialist resistance, feminist issues were not visible in the mainstream nationalist agenda, even well after independence in India. Over successive years, all homogenizing and patriarchal moves that accompany mainstream nationalism were subject to intense debate and scrutiny. In fact, this co-optation of feminist goals in nationalist neo-liberal agendas is a feature shared with many postsocialist economies. Menon critiques the concept of intersectionality which congeals into non-recognition multiple axes of identity, seeing race as the primary oppression. This has been a vexed issue for Dalit feminism(s). Finally, in relation to knowledge production, Menon identifies the production and distribution of knowledge as one still dominated by American and Western European academy, which potentially cripples dialogues between postsocialist and postcolonial scholars.

Euro-American feminism’s embeddedness in a neo-liberal geopolitical framework has created new though contested spaces for knowledge production among scholars, practitioners and policy-makers. In particular, a theoretical tool that has lost its transformatory potential is disidentification, specifically as a signifier for forging collective activism within Europe. In the age of global mobility and border-crossings, Western feminist disidentification is increasingly framed through a preconceived notion of the ‘other’ as dis-empowered, exotic and violent. These faulty identifications rather than integrating multi-ethnic intersectional identities deepen the cleavages, especially within the academy. This article draws on two case studies that emerged following the Delhi gang rape case (2012) in New Delhi, India. These studies highlight how debates within the western academy are largely framed from the standpoint of the empowered European feminist self. Thus disidentification, rather than being a process for unpacking hegemonic discourses, becomes, instead, yet another way of packaging new hierarchies of knowledge.

Decolonial critique of modernity/coloniality emerged at the end of the Cold war when the happy image of globalization was launched as the only option left for the humanity. Decolonial thought instead came up with the idea of decoloniality as an alternative possible world with a specific epistemology, ethics and politics. This decolonial model has gradually become attractive worldwide against the failure of the positive phase of neoliberal globalization epitomized in the Covid-19 crisis. The binaries of conservatism and radicalism as well as right and left, democracy and authoritarianism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism are outdated products of the previous model of knowledge unable to describe the present social and political reality in which conservatism easily becomes radical and calling for change, whereas yesterday’s radicals turn into supporters of status-quo who are nostalgic of the past. The present shift from neoliberal globalism to right-wing nationalism and populism essentially leaves the global coloniality intact and multiplies the number of the new dispensable defutured lives - human and other. It also adds additional angles of discrimination and dehumanization such as technological coloniality. Possible venues for decolonial re-existence are linked with relationality, refusal to compete for a better place in modernity or a tag of a victim, and working for “deep coalitions”, thus attempting to give the world back its future dimension.

This chapter problematizes methodologies as a Euromodern/colonial epistemic framework. It reflects upon alternative decolonial instruments of analysis and broader practices of knowing and making sense of the world, which escape conventional methodological definitions. Methodology is seen as a specific classifying operation that is rationally limited by default and distorting for those who are not part of the Euromodern sameness. Revisiting decolonial and Indigenous texts while claiming to do away with modern/colonial methodologies or entering into an intense debate with them, this chapter argues that there is a corpus of core decolonial feminist texts (by scholars such as Chela Sandoval, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, María Lugones, and Gloria Anzaldúa) that have engaged in dialogue with each other and, at different levels, with major methodological issues, and have come up with an open approach of relational experiential epistemic togetherness. The author addresses its main elements, including defamiliarization, decolonial hermeneutics, the corpopolitics and geopolitics of knowledge, being, sensing, the “Coatlicue state” and “la facultad” (as described in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands 1987). This chapter overall argues for emerging transversal decolonial agendas that advocate a shift towards imagining a redirected future that would come to life through the agency of changing communities and coalitions striving for re-existence.

Madina Tlostanova discusses artistic strategies of regenerating and ‘re-futuring’ in relation to the darker colonial side of post-Soviet existence.

A central concept of decolonial thought, “coloniality,” was coined by A. Quijano at an uneasy moment of the collapse of state socialism and discrediting of its utopia, and the arrival of neoliberal globalisation as the only legitimate narrative. Decoloniality is a reflection of disillusionment and a subsequent transference of decolonisation rhetoric from embodied anticolonial political struggles to the spheres of knowledge production and aesthesis. This meant at once a deeper critical delve into the modern/colonial mechanisms of the production of knowledge and subjectivities, but also a potential danger of depoliticisation. Whitewashed and sanitised “decolonial studies” or “decolonial theory” that fail to see the profound differences between postcolonial theory and decoloniality and often substitute decoloniality for deconstruction, yet keep the Euromodern epistemic framework intact, is what we find today in European and especially Nordic contexts. They are often marked by a blindness towards their own specific colonial trajectories and especially the imperial difference, and the struggles of indigenous peoples. A thorough decolonial revisiting of the Nordic colonial trajectories including the early suspended expansionist projects and specific forms of settler colonialism, could help enrich decolonial thought with additional critical optic and bring it more in tune with the current global challenges. These challenges go beyond the original decolonial focus on the intersection of race and capitalism incorporating the climate change, chronophobia, defuturing, and global unsettlement. They also urge decoloniality to move in the direction of relational agency unlimited to colonial difference alone and avoiding both the extreme of imagined indigeneity and a confinement to the ivory academic tower. Taking these nuances into account could help us come closer to an understanding of decolonial potentials in the future and its applicability in other places such as Nordic Europe.

Contemporary political, economic and social institutions have no adequate tools to deal with diversity and tend to see it as a challenge. The unresolved evils of modernity that neoliberal globalization attempted to lacquer in its first triumphant years, have reemerged with full force confirming the discriminatory nature of the global culture, its unfair conditions of inclusion through erasing identities or through their commercialization. The overwhelming negative sensibility marking the present darker stage of neoliberal globalization, is not a brotherhood but merely a condition of fellow sufferers who have not fully realized that we are in the same boat and need to cooperate rather than compete to survive. The opinion article addresses the danger of multiplying victimhood rivalries as a manifestation of the modern/colonial agonistics. This position replaces politics with manipulative moral zeal and withdraws the dimension of the future as a collective existential condition from the horizon. Delinking from victimhood rivalries is a difficult but urgent task of transcending modernity and looking for other options and other worlds intricately correlating and interacting in a complex pluriverse.

O design é considerado, no artigo, como um instrumento ontológicocapaz de transformar a realidade social e cultural e modelar aexperiência humana, a subjetividade e o ambiente. Concentro-me nasinterseções entre a compreensão de Tony Fry a respeito do designontológico e a interpretação decolonial da modernidade/colonialidadecomo um design global que determina a relação entre o mundo, as coisase os humanos. O artigo tenta traçar uma divisão entre os designsontológicos positivo (re-existentes) e negativo (desfuturizantes).Aborda a colonialidade do design que controla e disciplina nossapercepção e interpretação do mundo, de outros seres e das coisas, deacordo com certos princípios legitimados. A colonialidade do designtem acompanhado as utopias universalistas modernas predominantes, comoo marxismo ou o liberalismo e tem sofrido resistência, internamentee externamente, através de várias manifestações do pensamentoe da existência fronteiriços. Eu analiso o conceito de Fry dedesfuturização em relação ao conceito decolonial de pluriversalidade.Isso permite abordar mais detalhadamente o princípio correlacionaldinâmico como central para o design ontológico decolonial. Entre asferramentas especificamente decoloniais de design ontológico positivo,eu me concentro no Sumak Kawsay, na Democracia Terrestre e em maisalgumas iniciativas especificamente originadas nos movimentos sociaisde povos originários das regiões fronteiriças da Eurásia. O artigotambém aborda a descolonização de uma esfera afetiva como fundamentopara um design ontológico positivo. Por fim, defendo a necessidadede provincializar o design ocidental/do norte e permitir que odesign decolonial no Sul Global desenvolva sua fronteira “tantoquanto” posicionalidade positiva, uma postura transcultural negociala partir da geopolítica local e corpo-política colocar em diálogoe disputa com o moderno/colonial desarmamento design premissas.

After a short critical reflection on what is understood under anticolonial aesthetics and how it relates to the shift from political decolonization to a more epistemologically and aesthetically oriented decoloniality, the essay focuses on the seldom considered anticolonial and decolonial trajectories originating in the ex- and present colonies of the Russian/Soviet empire and post/neo-imperial Russia. It is analysed how these trajectories intersect with and diverge from the predominantly Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial conceptual and theoretical frames and what role is played in this configuration by the state socialist form of coloniality. Its most negative effects consist in recolonization presented as decolonization and the interrupted genealogies of anticolonial resistance and re-existence. As a result, each new generation has to start from scratch, while anticolonial thinkers and artists become enchanted by western (neo)liberalism presented as the only viable alternative to Russian and local authoritarian regimes.

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present époque.

The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement, and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites us to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing.

Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current époque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies, and posthumanities.

A transcript of the public discussion that took place on May 27, 2023 at Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw

A Skovorodian towards Shevchenko’s and Gogol’s Man 

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent”. Do those famous words spoken by Winston Churchill in 1946, which for years confirmed the simple dichotomy of Europe, still hold true? Did the breakthrough of 1989 really change the semantics of the concepts of East and West? In recent years, the metaphor of the “new Iron Curtain” has been reappearing more and more often. The still present inferiority complex of the periphery, populist governments based on nationalist and anti-European slogans, and, finally, the war in Ukraine and mass migrations strongly influence the creation of new divisions, but also provide an opportunity to create a new balance of power and a community far from right-wing populism and, at the same time, devoid of Western-centric hegemony. Today, the question of new European solidarity also becomes a question about the possibility of a new world and the values on which it is to be based”. A record of a debate held at the Powszechny Theatre as part of the Forum of the Future of Culture 2023.

Unsettlement is our current shared pluriversal human condition. We experience it differently depending on our trajectories, privileges and disadvantages. What we all share is the sense of ultimate defuturing. The negative phase of globalization coming to its apex, threatens to fold the world into a digital slavery in which coloniality would finally stop to be seen as a problem of refugees, migrants and indigenous people or a fashionable term of the academic elite, to be faced directly by each and every. The Covid-19 crisis has acted as an epitome of this tendency. Previously decoloniality has focused mainly on the critique of the intersections of race and capitalism in the production of knowledge and subjectivities, with a clear focus on the past. It has seldom addressed the future or ventured outside the position of the colonial difference (exteriority). In the face of the global challenges such as defunct politics and the ultra-right populist turn, the Anthropocene and technological colonization, the ongoing fragmenting of the human species, coloniality needs to be complemented with additional dimensions that would allow overcoming its stand-pointism and potentially unproductive refusal to dialogue across the imperial difference with other critical positions. One of such dimensions is unsettlement which is discussed in the article as a promising concept in the agenda for refuturing. It aims at transcending academic thinking to go in the direction of agency and bottom-up activism (political, social and artistic). In the last decade unsettlement has turned into a leitmotif of life in crisis per se manifested on the ontological, existential, affective and material levels of increasingly precarious lives of even those who seemingly stay in place thus bursting the modern/colonial binary of a rooted citizen versus an unsettled outlaw. With the Covid-19 crisis we have all become unsettled and brought to face the crisis of legitimacy of evacuated politics, of the nation-state, of international unions, institutions and bodies that have nothing to offer except a looming permanent state of exception and farmacopornographic control. Can the pluriversal unsettlement generate new transversal relational solidarity beyond the bankrupt institutions and power structures? Can it launch new communities of change which would inevitably also change us as humans? How would art and fiction react to these tectonic shifts and advance the shaping of the agendas of these communities of change? The article briefly addresses two possible paths for artistic representations of the unsettlement – the introspective one struggling with multiple identifications and re-weaving oneself and one’s world anew (exemplified by Hayv Kahraman’s works), and a less realized though promising way of the positive ontological design fictions and utopias/dystopias transcending modernity/coloniality to imagine an alternative other world (as manifested in a recent Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas exhibition). The unsettled birds rather than rooted trees are likely to be the main protagonists of these fictions and of the communities of change, helping us to learn that unsettlement can eventually bring a positive sense of the self and/in the world and a new political imagination to refuturing.

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.

Postkolonialność powinna być postrzegana jako ludzka kondycja, sytuacja egzystencjalna, podczas gdy dekolonialność jest opcją, świadomie wybraną jako pozycja polityczna, etyczna i epistemiczna. Takie niekonwencjonalne rozumienie terminów „postkolonialny” i „dekolonialny” pozwala przekroczyć długotrwałą rywalizację i geopolityczne podziały między studiami postkolonialnymi a opcją dekolonialną za pośrednictwem optyki i dyskursów postsocjalistycznych i postzależnościowych. Postsocjalistyczna interwencja wprowadza szereg pojęć niezbędnych do analizy relacji postsocjalistycznych i postkolonialnych. Wśród nich można wymienić imperialną różnicę, geopolitykę i korpopolitykę wiedzy, bycia, płci i odczuwania, dekolonialną estetykę oraz odwrócenie kierunków czasowych w kontekście postsowieckim. Dyskurs postkolonialny musi zostać skontekstualizowany i zradykalizowany. Oznacza to przejście od wyjaśniania „innego” w języku zrozumiałym dla niego samego do oderwania się od retoryki nowoczesności z jej ukrytą logiką kolonialną i prześledzenia innych genealogii wiedzy i aktywizmu oraz innych sposobów interpretowania nowoczesności / kolonialności.

The starting point of my reflections on postcolonialism and its old and new discontents is the idea that postcoloniality should be regarded as a condition, a certain human existential situation which we have often no power of choosing. While decoloniality is an option, consciously chosen as a political, ethical, and epistemic positionality and an entry point into agency. The postcolonial condition is more of an objective given, a geopolitical and geohistorical situation of many people coming from former colonies. The decolonial stance is one step further, as it involves a conscious choice of how to interpret reality and how to act upon it. It starts from a specific postcolonial situation, which can fall into the traditional sphere of interests limited to the British and French colonies, focus on a more typically decolonial Central and South American configuration, or even go beyond both locales and venture into the unconventional imperial-colonial histories of Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Sultanate, or Russia. A mere description of a postcolonial predicament or an analysis of its present outcomes in a concrete locale, then, must lead to the next step of developing an active and conscious ethical, political, and epistemic position whose goal is to decolonize thinking, being, perception, gender, and memory. So it is not enough to call a scholar postcolonial. It is crucial to take into account from the start not only our given objective positions but also who and what we chose to be in our profession and in our life. This understanding of the postcolonial and decolonial realms is rather unorthodox as, instead of stating for the umpteenth time the rather obvious differences in their origination and their links to various types of colonialism in India and Africa and in the Americas, I try to divorce them from their respective genealogies of knowledge and see how relevant these theories are when tested in quite different geopolitical regions such as Eurasia or Central and South-Eastern Europe.

The distinction between the condition and the option sheds some light on the main postcolonial flaw in the eyes of decolonial thinkers. It cannot be fixed with a mere addition of the new voices and geopolitical experiences (such as the post-Soviet, the post-Ottoman, or the post-Austrian-Hungarian) to the postcolonial choir. The postcolonial and the decolonial discourses refer not only to different locales but also to different modes of thinking and being in the world, although they frequently overlap with each other: The decolonial thinkers are quite often postcolonial people and the postcolonial scholars in their majority share the decolonial agenda. Still, there are spaces and conceptual tools within each of these discourses that remain opaque for the other, and areas which demonstrate their limitations when applied to a different local history such as the post-socialist postcolonial regions and experiences.

What is needed is a radical rethinking and clarification of theoretical and methodological grounds on which the imperial and colonial classifications are made, to problematize the predominantly descriptive and formal approach of the postcolonial studies, in the sense of assessing phenomena of completely different orders based on their formal affinity, such as being empires or colonies, yet often remaining blind to correlational structural and power asymmetries. Along with the Western liberal principle of inclusion (of the old and new others), which has repeatedly demonstrated its paternalistic inadequacy, or maybe instead of it, a different principle should be formulated. It should be based on a revision of the very architecture of power, knowledge, being, gender, and perception. It is necessary not to build into the existing system by merely expanding it with new elements, as postcolonial studies has mostly been doing, but rather to problematize this system as such and offer other options as the decolonial thought has attempted to do in the last two decades.

The chapter reflects on design thinking and training as an integral part of the global crisis yet also a sphere of its potential overcoming. It focuses on the main aspects of the crisis in design education within the broader higher education failure manifesting epistemic derelationality, commercialisation, depoliticisation, and instrumentalisation, and reinstatement of Euromodern epistemic frames. The question is how to learn, unlearn and relearn together to think and act creatively and pre-figuratively and continue building alternative relational spaces and models of positive transition and redirective ontological designing for refuturing that would incorporate a larger specter of human and non-human interests.

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

What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?: Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press) 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.

“What do most postcommunist countries—which almost thirty years after the end of the Soviet Bloc still deal with antagonizing feelings of loss, nostalgia, trauma, and never-ending transition, as well as with neocolonial domination of today's neoliberal world—all have in common? In her outstanding book, Madina Tlostanova defines these common experiences as a futureless ontology that reveals the social disorientation of post-Soviet identitarian collectivities. In so doing, she suggests that post-Soviet politically engaged art practices known as artivism offer a possible solution to this futureless ontology.” — Jelena Petrovic, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna

Starting from the premise that any childhood is existentially tragic, this fictionalised memory reflects on the last Soviet generation of children as a lost generation. This chapter is written as a memory stream based on free associations, and it dwells on the major leitmotifs and recurrent sensibilities that have shaped the author’s experience as a member of this generation. Following her personal trajectory, the memory stream refers to the symbol of the vertical, to the sense of being lost both literally and symbolically, to specific ways and strategies of hiding in her own world and rejecting the outside reality. These personal paths combine with more general patterns of double consciousness and redoubling of the world that generated a cynical framework in its late-Soviet children’s version: an urge to make their own escapist forms of alternative realities and internal emigration models in the decade just before perestroika. The chapter touches upon key late-Sovietoppositions that children of the 1970s learned to identify from early on in order to survive. It also considers the ethnic-racial and religious differences that affected the lost generation’s internalerosive processes.

The book conceptualizes a number of gender epistemic models, connected with decolonial philosophy, traces their similarities with and differences from the western feminist theories, gender discourses of the third world and diasporic feminists of color.  The book offers a short genealogy of gender discourses, identities and activism in two colonial spaces of Russia/USSR — Central Asia and the Caucasus, critically linking them with decolonial feminism and suggesting the ways and possibilities for their development in the future as a basis for the emancipation of the mind and knowledge from the gnoseological and ontological limitations of modernity and its darker side — coloniality, and building the trajectories of resistance and re-existence as well as transcultural and trans-value global dialogue on the level of the political society. 

The article contemplates the main changes in the ontology of the postsocialist people. It focuses on how and why the concept of the happy future and gradually future as such has left their imaginary. The authors concentrates on the main decolonial ideas relevant for the analysis of the postsoviet human condition, society, culture, and activist art. The paper also dwells on the anatomy of the Soviet imperial nostalgia trying to understand, what is the difference between the Soviet original and the postsoviet copy. The author delves into the analysis of various postsoviet trajectories within the global coloniality to show how the postsoviet world has become a space with no teleology and what challenges this entails for the homo postsovieticus.  

The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large. 

Tradução de Vitor Gomes Lopes do artigo "On Pluritopic Hermeneutics, Trans-modern Thinking, and Decolonial Philosophy" de Madina Vladimirovna Tlostanova e Walter Mignolo.