Decadent Orientalisms by David Fieni

Decadent Orientalisms by David Fieni

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).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780823286393
ISBN 10	0823286398
Title	Decadent Orientalisms
Author	David Fieni
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Fordham University Press
Year published	2020-01-07
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.