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“When you are the border, when the border cuts through you, when you do not cross borders in order to find yourself on either side, you do not discuss borders from some zero point positionality, but instead you dwell in the border, you do not really have much choice but to be a border thinker.”
Interview with Madina Tlostanova about post-soviet imaginary, global coloniality and gender discourses from a decolonial option.
Moscow, July 2013
*Madina Tlostanova is a professor of philosophy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, a trans-diasporic scholar with mixed ethnic origins (Circassian, Tatar, Uzbek) living in Moscow but extensively teaching abroad. Trained in Moscow State University as an American Studies major focusing on US Southern fiction, she gradually drifted to multiculturalism and transcultural aesthetics to finally shift to post/ decolonial interpretation of post-soviet space, subjectivities, literature and the arts. She has studied and taught in several universities in the USA and in Europe. Tlostanova has authored Multicultural Discourse and Late 20th Century US Fiction (Moscow, 2000, in Russian), Post-soviet Literature and the Aesthetics of Transculturation (Moscow, 2004, in Russian), From the Philosophy of Multiculturalism to the Philosophy of Transculturation (New York, 2008, in Russian), Decolonial Gender Epistemologies (Moscow, 2009, in Russian), The Sublime of Globalization? Sketches on Trans-cultural Subjectivity and Aesthetics (Moscow, 2005, in English), Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, in English) and Learning to Unlearn. Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Ohio State University Press, 2012, co-authored with Walter Mignolo). Currently she is working on a book on decolonial aesthetics.
