All posts tagged: imperial difference

What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?: Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire

Reviewed by Anthony Ballas, University of Colorado at Denver Madina Tlostanova. What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet?: Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 145 pp. Although the days of socialist realism have long passed, the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Perestroika and Glasnost reforms still ripples through the contemporary Russian Federation, in ways that can be traced with particular precision through the region’s aesthetic production. This is the argument posed by Madina Tlostanova in What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? The book updates Andrei Sinyavasky’s question “What is socialist realism?” from the perspective of post-Soviet Russia, focusing less on socialist realism itself (though it does come up within its pages) than on the postcolonial condition that the contemporary Russian Federation states find themselves in, socially and aesthetically, in the aftermath of Soviet modernism and neoliberal globalization.1 Tlostanova begins by examining what makes the Russian “imperial difference,” as she dubs it, a unique condition among the colonialisms of Russia’s imperial rivals …