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.

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.

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.

Thinking with four non-EU academic migrants from the global South, andtheir experiences of working/studying or starting to work/study duringthe Covid-19 pandemic, we are unravelling the current geopolitics ofthe internationalised higher education in the global North. Our centralargument is that Covid-19 has not simply affected the national andglobal politics of migration, including international academic migration,but it has also worked as a magnifying glass of the historicallyestablished inequalities sustained and perpetuated by physical,biomedical and epistemic borders. Most importantly, we are notfollowing the rather obvious theoretical route of biopolitics whileanalysing the internationalisation of higher education in relation to theCovid-19 health crisis and migration politics. Instead, we are looking atthis geo-biopolitical and epistemic assemblage through a decoloniallens. In doing so, we want to contribute with our and our interviewees’reflections to the ongoing discussion on what currently counts as‘internationalisation’ in higher education, pointing out the colononialand neoliberal foundations of it, and the possibilities of aligning it withthe efforts of decolonising the university.

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. 

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.

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.

Russian imperial and Soviet legacies still haunt many nations, and in many places elements of the Soviet and even Tsarist legacy are live political issues. This chapter provides an insight into the Circassian case that clearly demonstrates how the colonial history has been transformed into a neocolonial present. It discusses how Circassians, the indigenous people of the Northwestern Caucasus, are still reliving all sorts of trauma associated with Russian/Soviet imperialism and attempt to deconstruct the colonial discourse that marginalized or completely silenced them by falsifying or denying them their history and identity. Only in the post-Soviet period, Circassians started the process of reconnecting, remembering, reimagining, and reconceptualizing their identities. But, the struggle for historical truth in the North Caucasus is still ongoing and manifests itself in a clash between the official Soviet/Russian version of history that stubbornly insists on the old imperialist myths and the “counter memory” of Circassians who started to actively object to the ideologically motivated falsifications of their history. The subversive counter-discourse that undermines the imperial legacy is most strongly pronounced in literature and art of contemporary Circassian women-writers, artists, and activists.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

The postcolonial is regarded in this article as a human condition of those who belong to the colonial side of modernity. Decoloniality is interpreted as a conscious choice of ones political, ethical and epistemic position. This allows for the overcoming a lack of understanding between postcolonial studies and decolonial thought. The author considers postcolonialism and decolonial option through the mediation of post-socialist optics and formulates the possible ways of building their "deep coalitions" in the future.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Published to document a project by the Dagestani artist Taus Makhacheva that consists of the film Tightrope and the series of performances On the Benefits of Pyramids in Cultural Education, Strengthening of National Consciousness, and the Formation of Moral and Ethical Guideposts, this book is built around a dialogue between Makhacheva and the protagonist of her film, the tightrope walker Rasul Abakarov. The publication offers insight into the artist’s practice and elaborates on the topics she tackles in her works. The interplay between the histories of art and the narratives that structure one’s identity are further examined in the contributions by curator Bart De Baere, decolonial theorist Madina Tlostanova, and archivist Sabih Ahmed.

Design is regarded in the article as an ontological instrument that is able to transform the social and cultural reality, and model human experience, subjectivity and environment. I focus on the intersections between Tony Fry’s understanding of ontological design and the decolonial interpretation of modernity/coloniality as an overall design determining relation between the world, the things and the humans. The article attempts to draw a division between the positive (re-existent) and negative (defuturing) ontological designs. It addresses the coloniality of design that is control and disciplining of our perception and interpretation of the world, of other beings and things according to certain legitimized principles. The coloniality of design has accompanied the predominant modern universalist utopias such as Marxism or Liberalism and has been resisted internally and externally through various manifestations of border thinking and existence. I analyze Fry’s concept of defuturing in relation to the decolonial concept of pluriversality. This allows to address in more detail the dynamic correlational principle as central to decolonial ontological design. Among specific decolonial tools of positive ontological design I focus on Sumak Kawsay, Earth Democracy, and a few more specific initiatives originating in the indigenous social movements from Eurasian borderlands. The article also addresses decolonizing of the affective sphere as ground for a positive ontological design. Finally I argue for the necessity of provincializing the Western/Northern design and allowing the decolonial design in the Global South develop its positive border “both and” positionality, a negotiating transcultural stance starting from the local geopolitics and corpo-politics put into dialogue and dispute with the modern/colonial defuturing design premises.

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.

This article focuses on the analysis of the geo-politics and body-politics of being, and perception as the key concepts in the decolonial option grounded in the spatiality and corporeality of our cognitive and perceptive mechanisms. Revived spatiality refers in this case not only to a physical space that we inhabit but also to our bodies as specific spatial entities – the privileged white male bodies or the damned, non-white, dehumanized and often gendered and sexualized bodies from the underside of modernity. The article presents a decolonial interpretation of the human/non-human binary aimed at rethinking the fundamental modern/colonial division into anthroposand humanitas and the subsequent animalization of large human groups. The main questions are then what does it mean to be animalized by and in modernity and what ways out are possible, desired and attainable for the dehumanized others? The main goal of the article is to further question liberal Western humanism from a decolonial perspective, without yet dropping this concept altogether, and considering instead another humanism model suggested by Sylvia Wynter. Contemporary critical anti-humanist and “other humanism” theories often find a much more accurate and immediate realization through artistic metaphors and activist art projects than traditional theory, problematizing the border between the human and the animal, the man-made and the natural, the individual and the communal. Therefore, the article dwells at some length on one such project balancing between art and critical anthropology – the works of the Northern Caucasus decolonial artist Taus Makhacheva.

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.  

In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western others to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but effective feminist coalitions. Speaking from the position of postcolonial and postsocialist feminist others vis-a-vis the dominant Western/Northern gender studies mainstream, and drawing on examples from a broad range of social contexts (from the Armenian queer social movement to a recent Indian gang rape controversy), the authors of this article address the validity of two such transformative feminist tools: border thinking that operates on a more general theoretical level, and disidentification that offers a more praxial operational realisation of the border principle.

Museums are institutes of knowledge production, conservation and distribution. Their decolonisation involves their liberation from principles which are deeply-rooted in modernity/ coloniality. Perceptive and epistemic operations which control the appreciation of, and interaction with, artworks and other museum artefacts are problematised. Decolonisation also questions the museum as such, as embodying the “hubris of the zero point” (Castro-Gómez 1995), or the sensing and thinking subject, European by default, occupying a delocalised and disembodied vantage point which eliminates any other possible ways to produce, transmit and represent knowledge, allowing for a world view to be built on a rigid essentialist progressivist model.

Departing from the previous tripartite post-colonial/neocolonial geopolitical structure, contemporaryworld offers a different specter of possibilities and alliances which rearrange the former actors andtheir mutual relations and (in)dependencies in unexpected ways. The most striking of such shifts isthe reemergence of Asia on a global scale within a dewesternizing model, which negotiates postcolonialand modernizing impulses at once. However, there are regions which have lost their ability(and right) to speak and think and were disqualified from the position of the honorary secondworld to that of the global South. Such are the Asian regions that used to be a colonial part of theRussian/Soviet empire. They went through a Soviet modernization which redoubled their colonialstatus due to a subalternized position of the Russian/Soviet empire itself, now going through its finaldemise. This article reflects on what options are left for the former Asian colonies of Russia/Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) which today are once again stereotyped through Orientalist orProgressivist lens, and left out by both rewesternizing and dewesternizing parties. A good optionfor them is a decolonial option grounded in restoring memories, local histories, and epistemologiesin a complex and dynamic interplay with and a resistance to modernity. As a post-Soviet anddecolonial Asian other, the author attempts a critical analysis of intersections between post-sovietand post-colonial dependencies and possible decolonizing projections that might help this other Asiaeventually join the triumphant Asian century in the capacity of one of its rightful agents.

The article considers the main challenges faced by the post-Soviet social sciences in the global configuration of knowledge, marked by  omnipresentcoloniality. In disciplinary terms this syndrome is manifested in the social sciences/ versus area studies divide from which the post-Soviet is either excluded or equalized with postcolonial discourses. The situation can be described as a general invisibility of the post-Soviet space and its social sciences and scientists for the rest of the world and the refusal of the global North to accept the post-Soviet scholar in the capacity of a rational subject. The reasons for this complex intersection of the post-Soviet, postcolonial and other post-dependence factors are both internal and external, political and epistemic. Following the methodological principles of decolonial option the author analyses such specific elements of the post-Soviet stagnant configuration in knowledge production as the external imperial difference and the double colonial difference, the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge the way they are reflected in the knowledge production and distribution, paying specific attention to the possible ways out of this epistemic dead-end.