Decadent Orientalisms : : The Decay of Colonial Modernity / / David Fieni.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2020 English
• VerfasserIn: Fieni, David,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West.Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Orientalist decadence -- Part I. (Dis)integrating semitism: French and arabic in the twilight of the ottoman empire -- Chapter 1. French decadence, Arab awakenings: figures of decay in the nahda -- Chapter 2. Al- shidyaq’s decadent carnival -- Chapter 3. From dreyfus in the colony to céline’s anti- semitic style -- Part II. Working through postcolonial decadence -- Chapter 4. Resurrecting colonial decadence in independent Algeria -- Chapter 5. Algerian women and the invention of literary mourning -- Chapter 6. Virtual secularization: abdelwahab meddeb’s “walking cure” and the immigrant body in France -- Conclusion. Toward a contrapuntal double critique of colonial modernity -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Select bibliography -- Index