What does it really mean to be “post-Soviet”? And is it time to leave that label behind?

In this episode of Yurt Jurt, host Diana Kudaibergen speaks with Madina Tlostanova - decolonial thinker, writer, and Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University. Tlostanova is the author of What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? and Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art, and one of the leading voices on decolonial thought in Eurasia.

They explore how Central Asian identities are still framed through the “post-Soviet” lens, the role of the nation-state in shaping self-understanding, and how indigenous sustainable ways of living resist extractive state logics. The conversation also asks why academia so often reproduces colonial structures - and why art, rather than universities, has become a space for powerful decolonial expression.