By Victoria Kravtsova, Humboldt Universität Berlin
Between the post-s
Russian theorist Madina Tlostanova describes the ex-Soviet space as a “void”[1] in the structure of global knowledge production, in which the Global South has a symbolic right to postcolonialism and the Global North, to postmodernism. For her, post-socialism or post-communism as a theoretical lens is insufficient to grasp the “postsocialist, postcolonial and post imperial overtones [that] intersect and communicate in the complex imaginary of the ex-Soviet space.”[2] Tlostanova believes that the Soviet approach to creating “its own New Woman in her metropolitan and colonial versions” implied that “the gendered subjects of the ex-colonies of Russia and the USSR are not quite postcolonial and not entirely postsocialist.”[3] However, this specificity, as well as “presocialist local genealogies of women’s struggles and resistance, tend to be erased.”[4]
Postcolonial theory becomes increasingly popular in the post-Soviet contexts as processes of decolonization continue in the former ‘periphery’ of the former USSR.
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