Introduction: Orientalist decadence -- French decadence, Arab awakening : figures of decay in the Nahda -- Al-shidyaq's decadent carnival -- From Dreyfus in the colony to Celine's anti-Semitic style -- Resurrecting colonial decadence in independent Algeria -- Algerian women and the invention of literary mourning -- Virtual secularization : Abdelwahab Meddeb's "walking cure" and the immigrant body in France -- Conclusion: Toward a contrapuntal double critique of colonial modernity
Summary
Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Fieni reads both Western and Islamic discourses of decadence to show the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism's power
Analysis
Arabic literature
Francophone literature
Islam
Maghreb
Orientalism
colonial modernity
decadence
language politics
philology
secularism
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes
Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on January 23, 2020)