Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art : Resistance and Re-existence

"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" -- Font no determinada Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art 4 Acknowledgements 6 Prologue 8 Contents 10 List of Figures 11 1 Introduction: A Leap Into the Void? 12 1.1 The Postsocialist Predicament: From the ‘End of History’ to a Postcolonial Analogizing 12 1.2 On the Wrong Progressivism and Starting from Scratch 17 1.3 The Splendours and Miseries of Post-Cold War Studies 21 1.4 The Post-Dependence Condition 26 1.5 Global Coloniality and the Postsocialist Other 28 1.6 Beyond the Void? 31 2 How to Disengage from the Coloniality of Perception 33 2.1 An Old Hat in a New Box: Homo Altermodernus, or a Montage Human Being? 34 2.2 Aesthesis and Aesthetics 39 2.3 Art and Beauty 41 2.4 Knowledge, Aesthesis, and Art 45 2.5 Aesthesis and Corporality 47 2.6 The Decolonial Sublime 49 2.7 A Decolonial Community of Sense? 52 Note 54 3 Decolonial Art in Eurasian Borderlands 55 3.1 Close Up 1: Passing for Boy-Batyr? 64 3.2 Close Up 2: Defloration of Kazakhness 73 3.3 Close Up 3: A Buddhist Trickster 78 4 Decolonizing the Museum 83 4.1 Museum Interventions around the Caucasus: The Post-Imperial and the Decolonial 88 5 Postsocialist/Postcolonial Tempo-Localities 103 5.1 Revisiting Foucauldian Heterotopias and Bakhtin’s Chronotopes 105 5.2 Decolonizing the Tempo-Localities of Post-Dependence 108 5.3 Close Up 1: From Baku to Moscow and Back 114 5.4 The Tempo-Local Dimensions of War and...World 117 5.5 Close Up 2: A Post-Soviet ‘Midnight Child’ 120 5.6 Close Up 3: An Unlikely Estonian-Georgian ‘Creolization’ 125 5.7 Home, Transit, and Paradigmatic Unhomedness 129 5.8 Cemetery as a Heteroclite 132 5.9 Rethinking the Idyll 133 Notes 138 6 Tricksters, Jesters, Qalandars 139 6.1 Tricksters on the Road 142 6.2 Close Up 1: Ilkhom 145 6.3 Probing Metamorphosis, Problematizing Mimicry 148 6.4 Post-Soviet Mimicry 152 6.5 Close Up 2: The Post-Soviet Reverse Metamorphosis and Mimicry 159 Note 165 7 Coloniality of Memory at the Postcolonial/Postsocialist Juncture 166 7.1 The Anatomy of Violence and the Coloniality of Memory 167 7.2 Sexual Violence as a Form of Genocide 173 7.3 Decolonizing ‘Death and the Maiden’ 178 7.4 To Forget and Forgive, or a Multilayered Betrayal 181 7.5 Looking in the Torturer’s Eyes 185 7.6 A Visit of a Monster, or a Father with No Face 189 7.7 Doubling as Healing 195 7.8 An Enemy Inside Your Own Body 197 Notes 199 8 Afterword: An Open Finale 201 Bibliography 213 Index 227 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 overcoming them Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: A Leap Into the Void?....Pages 1-21 How to Disengage from the Coloniality of Perception....Pages 23-44 Decolonial Art in Eurasian Borderlands....Pages 45-72 Decolonizing the Museum....Pages 73-92 Postsocialist/Postcolonial Tempo-Localities....Pages 93-128 Tricksters, Jesters, Qalandars....Pages 129-155 Coloniality of Memory at the Postcolonial/Postsocialist Juncture....Pages 157-191 Afterword: An Open Finale....Pages 193-204 Back Matter....Pages 205-224