Madina Tlostanova on decolonizing the post-Soviet, exotization and political imagination(s)
part two
with Victoria Kravtsova
10th October 2019
Taking a decolonial angle on the (post-)Soviet modernity opens an array of questions before artists, activists and scholars working within and from this locale. How to address the post-Soviet pasts and futures without collapsing into exoticization and orientalization? Victoria Kravtsova asked Madina Tlostanova for her reflections on the subject.
Victoria Kravtsova
What is the role of the post-Soviet in decolonial thinking? In which form does it make sense to work with the Soviet heritage and experience(s)?
Madina Tlostanova
In the global context of today’s world stuck in a systemic crisis of everything the post-Soviet and wider, post-Socialist sensibility is important to critically analyze and take into account in any efforts to imagine a future, because it is a different version of modernity/coloniality that has been erased and forgotten after the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the neoliberal globalization and the end of history model. It is important first of all because it can help avoid or at least predict certain mistakes that were already made within the Soviet experiment. Additionally, it is important as a nuancing and complication of the conceptual black-and-whiteness that is often to be found in geopolitical thinking. Historically it is perhaps important to work with the Soviet legacy (and it is done more or less satisfactorily) although I am more interested in the post-soviet post-traumatic experiences and their reflections which have not yet received all the attention they deserve. Needless to say, this should be a critical work which requires a number of tools many of which do not even exist and need to be invented by the post-soviet thinkers themselves.
Victoria Kravtsova
How does reflecting on the experience of a failed Soviet modernity helps to find ways out of the current context of multiple and overlapping discriminations?
Madina Tlostanova
Many of the current discriminations are just continuations, developments and distortions of what already existed in the failed Soviet modernity and/or results of being unable and unwilling to criticize the Soviet models. Starting from scratch and taking into account only the present situation without the trace of the Czarist Russian and Soviet patterns inevitably oversimplifies the picture and erases the genealogies of the current intersectional nodes.
So this critical reflection is necessary for better understanding where we are now and why. As for finding the ways out, it is a different story as it requires to imagine and create something new, something different, rather than just going back or denouncing the past. Yet in this case, as well, a critical awareness of the Soviet experience is an important asset.
Victoria Kravtsova
How to attract attention to the specificity of the (post-)Soviet context without exotifying the (post-)Soviet subject and/or reproducing colonial relationships?
Madina Tlostanova
I am not sure at all that I want to attract the attention to our specificity or rather, we have to agree first whose attention we want to attract and why. The hegemonic Global North will not be convinced so in this case I agree with the decolonial principle of radical delinking. It is better to just do our job of analyzing the post-Soviet specificity to better understand ourselves and trace our possible future trajectories without attracting the attention or asking to be admitted into this elite knowledge-production club. If you mean the internal relations between the former metropolis and its quasi-colonies (the Soviet republics), it is a different story, because here a postcolonial denial or/and rage need to be taken into account and a lot depends on who is doing this research or even who has the right to do it. The risk of reproducing the familiar missionary syndrome and orientalist frames is very high. At the same time, the other extreme of the stand-point positions is also not an option. Balancing these approaches relationally is a hard but necessary task.
Victoria Kravtsova
Why quasi-colonies? What makes you use this term to describe, for instance, the relationship of the Soviet state to Central Asian republics?
Madina Tlostanova
To me, they are colonies pure and simple, though in some points different from British or French colonies overseas. But of course the Soviet tactic was precisely to persuade the colonies that they were liberated by the Soviet regime and present their recolonization as decolonization - this is the myth still very much alive in Central Asia. So they are quasi-colonies in the way they understood themselves and their history through the soviet brainwashing. It is the rhetoric of soviet modernity and its logic of coloniality.
Victoria Kravtsova
What kind of futures do you see for the artists, activists, scholars working in and with the (post-) Soviet context? In the context of the currently collapsing neoliberal system, is there a place for specific context-based utopias? Do we need common utopias – if yes, where could they come from?
Madina Tlostanova
I think the time for utopias has passed long ago and is irrevocable. We do not need utopias or nostalgia. We need a realistic analysis and learning to understand more rather than know more (just accumulate knowledge) trying to save what little there is still to save on this planet or at least postpone the global catastrophic shifts. And this is not a context-based task, it is as global as it can be as it relates to each and every, but it is also thoroughly relational, dynamic and complex. In other words, if we as a species do not treat the complex crisis of today as a common challenge we will soon disappear together with the rest of life on this planet. And this is something that can perhaps bring us back together not in a homogenizing way, keeping our differences intact, yet realizing the importance of this final utmost challenge that no one can escape.
The question then is not about utopias but rather about what are we ready to sacrifice in our stand-point particularities for the sake of survival and refuturing, to quote Tony Fry. Such a political imagination cannot come ready and finished from anywhere I am afraid. We would have to imagine and create it together in a (co)relational way. There is no guarantee of success here and no shining closed utopia in the end but only humble efforts to conscious and cautious redirective practices, of walking along a hard path marked by constantly asking questions on the way, listening to answers and reimagining our designs relationally.
Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and fiction writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). She focuses on decolonial thought, feminisms of the Global South, postsocialist sensibilities, fiction and art. Her most recent books include Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and What Does it Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018).
Victoria Kravtsova has studied International Relations in St. Petersburg and Berlin. In Berlin she is active in NGO projects in Eastern Europe, co-organizing seminars and exchange programs in the fields of environment, human rights, gender equality and civic education. Victoria receives a scholarship from Heinrich Böll Foundation and is engaged in writing her thesis “Between the ‘posts’, out of the void” where she traces the travels of the contemporary feminist discourses to and from Central Asia.
Editors: Ina Hildebrandt, Ira Konyukhova.