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.

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

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).