Narratives of Unsettlement: Being Out-Of-Joint as a Generative Human Condition

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present époque.

The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement, and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites us to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing.

Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current époque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies, and posthumanities.

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).