The Postcolonial Condition, the Decolonial Option, and the Post-socialist Intervention

Madina Tłostanowa

Abstract

Postcoloniality should be regarded as a human condition, an existential situation, whereas decoloniality is an option, consciously chosen as a political, ethical, and epistemic positionality. Such an unconventional understanding of the terms “postcolonial” and “decolonial” allows to transcend the long-going rivalry and geopolitical divisions between the postcolonial studies and the decolonial option through the medium of the post-socialist and post-dependence optics and discourses. The post-socialist intervention launches a number of concepts necessary for the analysis of the post-socialist / postcolonial intersections. Among them, the imperial difference; the geopolitics and corpopolitics of knowledge, being, gender, and sensing; decolonial aesthesis; and the reversal of temporal directions in the post-Soviet context. Postcolonial discourse needs to be contextualized and eventually radicalized. It means a shift from the explanation of the other in the language understandable by the same to delinking from the rhetoric of modernity with its hidden colonial logic and tracing other genealogies of knowledge and activism and other ways of interpreting modernity / coloniality.