Postsocialist subject as a new other: global coloniality, border thinking and decolonial option

Madina Tlostanova. Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration gives a talk on the post-communist remapping of the world has effectively left the post-socialist people out of the new world order of global coloniality. We are inhabiting its margins and desperately trying to cross the newly drawn seemingly transparent but in fact much more impenetrable boundaries, in the strange capacity of the new subalterns who are longing yet are never able to belong, remaining forever marked with a peculiar double consciousness of being too same to be real others for the West and too different to be fully accepted. This sensibility can evolve in the direction of anger, rejection and hostility, in a predictable assimilative way of crossing borders in order to eventually reroot in a new soil. But it can also give birth to a specific version of positive though critical border thinking (dwelling in the border being the border rather than simply crossing borders). This stance intersects in many ways with decolonial option originating in Latin American thought, as well as with more well known Anglophone postcolonial studies, but there are also considerable diversions due to specific local histories of the Post-Socialist world. Why then the post-socialists still do not have a discourse of their/our own and largely remain invisible? And how the post-socialist border thinking and imaginary can be drawn into the general picture of global coloniality and the no less global decolonial response?