Decadent Orientalisms

The Decay of Colonial Modernity

David Fieni (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

224 Seiten

2020 | New edition
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8232-8640-9 (ISBN)

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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.

David Fieni is Assistant Professor of French at the State University of New York, Oneonta. He is the translator of Laurent Dubreuil's Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression (Cornell).

Introduction: Orientalist Decadence 1
Part I: (Dis)integrating Semitism: French and Arabic in the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire
1. French Decadence, Arab Awakenings: Figures of Decay in the Nahda 31
2. Al-Shidyaq's Decadent Carnival 52
3. From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline's Anti-Semitic Style 68
Part II: Working Through Postcolonial Decadence
4. Resurrecting Colonial Decadence in Independent Algeria 97
5. Algerian Women and the Invention of Literary Mourning 118
6. Virtual Secularization: Abdelwahab Meddeb's "Walking Cure" and the Immigrant Body in France 136
Conclusion: Toward a Contrapuntal Double Critique of Colonial Modernity 159
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 177
Select Bibliography 203
Index 215

Erscheinungsdatum	06.03.2019
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
ISBN-10	0-8232-8640-1 / 0823286401
ISBN-13	978-0-8232-8640-9 / 9780823286409
Zustand	Neuware