Dear Colleagues,

The latest issue of Ab Imperio (1/2024) is now available at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52539

In the “Methodology and Theory” section, David Chioni Moore revisits his seminal article “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique”, discussing complex asymmetries in postcolonial and post-Soviet debates since 2001. By bringing Kenyan and Gazan perspectives to the debates about Russia’s recolonization war against Ukraine, he suggests that there is high time for postcolonial studies to end the silence on the Russo-Soviet sphere.

The “History” section features two articles that address subaltern groups struggling against oppression. Igor Kuziner studies the rise and fall of the “Red Death” legend about the Old Believers-Wanderers as a case of recoding from religious marginals into members of the ethnically Russian majority. Mirlan Bektursunov traces how the Soviet regime’s exploitation of preexisted hierarchies and promotion of lineage stratification in Kyrgyz nomadic society contributed to the conservation of lineage identities in the region until the post-Soviet period.

The “ABC: Empire & Nationalism Studies” section opens the series “New Curricula for New Histories of Northern Eurasia” by publishing Ismael Biyashev’s syllabus on Eurasian nomadism as a complex and historically evolving phenomenon.

In the “Newest Mythologies” section, Ilya Gerasimov discusses the latest novels by modern Russian classic writer Vladimir Sorokin, arguing that, instead of affirming a postmodernist worldview, Sorokin outlined a program for a new modernism.