Narratives of Unsettlement

Madina Tlostanova is a Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden. She has written widely on existential, epistemic, gender and aesthetic aspects of coloniality and decoloniality, on the intersections of the post-socialist and postcolonial human conditions, fiction and arts over the past twenty years. Her recent books include Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re- existence (2017), What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (2018), A New Political Imagination. Making the Case (2020, co-authored with Tony Fry).

• I. IntroductionOverture: The Chimera of unsettlementII. Variations on the time of unsettlement 1. Furia and the zärdaly jam 2. Can we fix the disjointed time?III. We will never be settled again 3. A tower on the Simurgh Mountain 4. The unsettled worlding(s)IV. Against immunity5. A cream-cheese choux 6. Biomedical coloniality and the Covid-19 conundrum 7. A portrait of an unknown ladyV. Carmen Saeculare 8. The song of the age that has never come9. Hikikomori in the time of plague

"With this book, Madina Tlostanova invites us to refuture our worlds, by disinterring ourselves from the ‘scorched soil’ of the personal and planetary crises currently occupying the wake of western/colonial/Eurocentric hegemony. To rupture paralytic entanglements enabled by the ‘hollow silence’ and ‘cultural stagnation’ that underwrite our incapacities to re-imagine beyond straightjackets of fear, privilege, disavowal and hatred." Alice Feldman, University College Dublin, Coordinator of the Masters` Program "Race, Migration and Decolonial Studies""Madina Tlostanova method is to inter-weave sharp critical argument with richly imagined speculative fictions. These stunning fables evoke past and future disasters with pathos and humour: a forgotten flu epidemic, failed extractivism in the Caucasus told through several generations; the last inhabitant of a leper colony; a future of socially distanced isolation as the permanent condition of technologically enhanced elites sealed off from the abandoned majority."Anne-Marie Willis, Studio at the Edge of the World, Tasmania"Blowing up the Western(ized) categories of critical and epistemological thinking inborn to Modernity/Coloniality, Tlostanova endeavors to reconfigure those issues by unexpectedly knitting nonfiction and fiction, essays and speculative narratives, in other words, by beautifully juxtaposing thinking and feeling, scientific truth and poetic truth. Finally, inviting the reader to yield to the unsettling way of getting knowledge by thinking with art, Tlostanova also invites us to learn to live unsettlement as a potentially fulfilling condition and, paradoxically, a provisional exit from our space and time out of joint."Luigi Cazzato, University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Italy