• Tue 03 11 2015 •
The Janus-Faced Empire: Russia’s Neo-Imperial Revival Madina Tlostanova

with MADINA TLOSTANOVA

Neoliberal globalization has its darker side: a global coloniality in which older imperial- colonial relations are reinstated in new and unexpected ways, so that colonizer and colonized could fall together in the same formation. Such is the peculiar position of the former socialist world – and Russia in particular – according to Madina Tlostanova, one of the few theorists to explore the aftereffects of socialism’s own partially hidden colonial aspirations. Her talk addresses the reemergence of a second-rate imperial logic in Russia today, one based on catching up and mimicry. It generates its own ethnic and imperial nationalism and actively revives xenophobia. Yet at the same time, it articulates the aspiration of a failed empire that manipulatively takes over post-colonial arguments in order to pass as a victim. Tlostanova reflects critically on the doomed and fake neo-imperial complexes and explores the possibility of truly decolonial alternatives that the Janus-faced empire is not yet ready to implement. After the talk, curator EKATERINA DEGOT engages in a conversation with Madina Tlostanova.

20:00
English
Venue: Academyspace, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
3 €


An event in the frame of PLURIVERSALE III.