5. You Can’t Go Home Again… Especially if You Have Never Had One

Madina Tlostanova grew up in the North Caucasus in the 1970s–1980s. In her fluid identification, she combines indigenous Circassian and Uzbek origins linked to the darker colonial spaces and histories of the Soviet empire. Having spent three decades in the belly of the beast (Moscow) she finally moved to Sweden in 2015 to make one of her previous hobbies, feminist and gender studies, into a ‘profession’. She is a decolonial feminist thinker and writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She focuses on decolonial thought, postsocialist human condition, artivism, feminisms of the Global South, critical future studies. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press 2018), A New Political Imagination: Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge 2020), Decoloniality of Knowledge, Being and Sensing (Almaty, Kazakhstan: Center of Contemporary Culture Tselinny 2020), and Narratives of Unsettlement: Being Out-of-Joint as a Generative Human Condition (Routledge 2023).