David Fieni's sophisticated and cogently argued Decadent Orientalisms examines a selection of literary texts through the lens of Orientalism, defined as “a style of having power” that equates progress with “the Occident” and decline with “the Orient.” Fieni associates decadence with Orientalism's conception of the “biological degeneration, social backwardness, philological stuntedness, and historical belatedness” of Arabs and Muslims during “colonial modernity” (p. 71). Noting that these groups continue to be represented today in “the West” as irrational, unscientific, and incapable of living in secular society, Fieni traces how France's colonial mission left a legacy of anti-Semitism in the Arab world (p. 98), and how the French empire “continue[d] to engineer and reengineer the Semitic object for its own nationalist purposes” (p. 51). He demonstrates how closely Orientalism is linked to the Algerian Civil War, the War on Terror, and contemporary debates on “anti-Jewish anti-Semitism” and Islamophobia. The trope of the decadent Semite who is stagnant yet inherently degenerate has been recycled and renewed over time in the West. Arabs have rejected the trope and denounced, in turn, European and American decadence.
Divided into two parts, the book focuses on late 19th and early 20th century French and Middle Eastern writers and then on North African writers from the 1970s to 2010. Fieni chooses to emulate Edward Said's “contrapuntal critique,” considering Western discourses of Eastern decline and Arab and Islamic responses. Chapter 1 investigates the “anti-Semitic philosophy of history” of French philologist Ernest Renan, the purveyor of enduring Orientalist tropes who was excoriated by Said. The concept of decadence lends itself well to an analysis of how Renan and others measured a society's “collective health or vitality.” Affirming France as a superior nation and Indo-European languages as models, they placed Semites “under the banner of biological and linguistic degeneration” (p. 8). Renan contends in Averroès et l'averroïsme (1852) that the Arab mind and Islam are incompatible with a rational secular viewpoint. As Fieni shows, Renan was influential for certain Arab and Muslim thinkers of this era as they reflected on their own “decline” under the Ottoman Empire and as Europeans gained power in the region. They created the cultural movement the Nahda, “awakening/renaissance.” After Renan's lecture on “Islam and Science,” Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani, a Persian Islamic reformist, took him to task for “his erroneous and anti-Arab racism” although conceding that religions stifled rationalism. Fieni highlights other examples of “disruptive” responses to Orientalist narratives by Middle Eastern intellectuals who interrogated the possibilities of secularism in their societies, such as Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, a Muslim reformer, and Farah Antun, a Christian writer and translator.
Chapter 2 focuses on Lebanese linguist and writer Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq whose 800-page multigenre 1855 text al-Saq ‘ala al-saq fi ma huwa al-Faryaq, “Crossing Legs over Faryaq,” was hailed as a masterpiece of the Arab literary renaissance. It brought renewal through its transgression of both Western metaphysics and Islamic theocracy. Published in Paris, its mixed reception among Arabs was due to its critique of Near Eastern society and its iconoclastic and scatological nature. Humphrey Davies’ 2015 translation into English (Leg Over Leg, a bilingual Arabic-English edition) garnered interest among Anglophone scholars. Whereas European critics tended to ascribe al-Saq's success to the influence of Laurence Stern or François Rabelais, Fieni turns to Mikhail Bakhtin, recalling the carnivalesque tradition in Arabic literature and highlighting how the work “radically affirms the existence of indigenous Arabic forms” (p. 54) while modernizing the Arabic language. Fieni is particularly drawn to al-Shidyaq for his “will to disrupt established regimes of authority through insistence on ambivalence and the capacity to generate other meanings” (p. 63).
Chapter 3 opens with the Dreyfus affair “and its afterlives in France and Algeria in order to identify and critique the political, rhetorical, and social mechanisms that fracture the Semitic object of knowledge fabricated by European Orientalism” (p. 68). Fieni construes decadence as the dis-integration of the Semite into Arab and Jew. He shows how Renan's disparaging commentary on Semitic languages was symptomatic of anti-Jewish discourses circulating in Europe and how the French government “engineered” enmity between Jews and Muslims in colonial Algeria by manipulating status and citizenship rights. An anti-Jewish press flourished in Algeria and as tensions around the affair continued to rise, riots and pogroms spread. “Discourses of pathology, paranoia and social degeneration” were reignited in the 1930s with Louis-Ferdinand Céline's anti-Semitic pamphlets such as Bagatelles pour un massacre (p. 86). Fieni notes that Céline's writing shares a “Rabelaisian” vigor with al-Shidyaq's. The latter deploys the Arabic language as a symbolic resistance against Ottoman rule and European power whereas Céline brings renewal to the French language through his creative plagiarizing of “reactionary colonial clichés about the Semitic minority” (p. 93).
Chapter 4 focuses on two Algerian novelists, Tahar Wattar, who wrote in Arabic, and Tahar Djaout, who wrote in French and was assassinated at age 39. The linguistic policies of postcolonial Algeria are placed in historical context, showing that one “central strategy of Orientalism” was the linguistic “purification” promulgated by the French and another was the inciting of Jews and Arabs against each other (p. 101). Post-independence leaders instituted an Arabization program excluding Amazigh languages and French. Fieni “stages a critical encounter” between two experimental novels, Wattar's Al-Zilzal (1974) and Djaout's L'invention du désert (1987), that “aim their critique at the Algeria of the 1970s and 80s” and “revisit the decadent postcolonial city through the eyes of characters” “who represent the Maghrebian Islamic establishment” (pp. 107, 115). Fieni elucidates how Wattar “draws on the Arabic literary tradition and unsettles it in significant ways” while Djaout “reverses the vision of the Nahda as an awakening to the genuine Arab self, and instead offers history as terror, paralysis, and decay” (p. 114).
Chapter 5 analyzes novels by Algerian women writers published between 1979 and 2007 in Arabic (Ahlam Mosteghanemi) and in French (Yamina Mechakra, Assia Djebar, and Hélène Cixous). Fieni extols how their representations of the Algerian war of independence and civil war “actively experiment with and crack open the feminized configurations of Orientalist decadence and loss” and “chart ways out of the impasse” (pp. 119, 135). Fieni emphasizes these writers’ ability to enact the work of memory that falls to them as women navigating public and private spaces during times of unrest. Female solidarity is also evident “through language and outside of languages” (p. 119). Djebar's novel Le blanc de l'Algérie (1995) exemplifies a shared preoccupation as it “meditates on the meaning of its own use of language while alluding to the multilingual reality of the country” (p. 130).
Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb's postmodern novels, Talismano (1979) and Phantasia (1986) are the focus of Chapter 6. Fieni considers Meddeb a “Muslim atheist” and “critical secularist,” citing his claim that Islamic culture's greatest strengths stem from transgressions of the Islamic letter of the law (p. 150). For Meddeb, the vibrancy of Islamic societies is due to revolt rather than a reliance on the past (p. 151). Like Nietzsche, Meddeb “deploy[s] discourses of decadence to articulate a future that is already inscribed in the past” (p. 157). Fieni contends that Meddeb, through his use of French, can “write Islam without Arabic” (p. 152) by evoking the practices of Arabic calligraphy and Islamic iconoclasm (p. 140). Fieni's analysis is at times abstruse here and could be strengthened by including Meddeb's The Malady of Islam and writings by Moroccan philosopher Mohammed al-Jabiri.
In his conclusion, Fieni explores how Said's critical method of contrapuntal reading is enhanced by Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi's double critique which deconstructs the oppositions inherent in imperialist discourse. Both theorists foregrounded “the continuing predominance of dispossessed languages and discourses” (p. 165). Fieni asserts that “Khatibi has taken this problematic of language conflict further than any other writer of his generation” (p. 168) (although Abdelfattah Kilito, Khatibi's compatriot, might also be considered in this context). Fieni ends optimistically noting that “Orientalized writers and thinkers” will continue to move “beyond the rhetoric of blame” and enact “a will to escape, disturb, and act through language” (p. 171).
Fieni's skillful close readings of primary sources help ground the book, offering a counterweight to the density of his jargon. He makes judicious use of secondary sources by both philosophers and literary critics (including a fair proportion of Arabophones), deftly summarizing and adding nuance to their theoretical positions. Occasionally Fieni's metaphors of mapping, networks, and the body (e.g., “ideological skin on social body” (p. 4) feel somewhat heavy-handed. The historical and geographical breadth of the book is impressive but runs the risk of causing the theme of decadence to become amorphous when it carries multiple significations. Nevertheless, Fieni makes a laudable effort to create a cohesive argument across this collection of essays. In addition, the editing is nearly flawless and there are useful notes, a rich bibliography, an index, and a handsome cover featuring a painting by Moroccan artist Miloudi.
Decadent Orientalisms is a well-researched, thought provoking study that will be of interest to comparativists and translators as well as to scholars of Arabic literature and Francophone literature (littérature monde en français). The Saidian paradigm proves its continued relevance as a tool to dismantle discourses of otherness and inferiority.
