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

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.

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).