Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity: by David Fieni, New York, Fordham University Press, 2020, 220 pp., hardcover $110, paperback $32, e-book $30.40, ISBN 9780823286393.

The book takes as its subject matter the "planetary discourse of decadence" (159), which Fieni reads as both a modern, or pre-decolonization, and contemporary, or post-decolonization, phenomenon linked to colonialism. In a disciplinary landscape in which national literatures and their departments are increasingly under threat of contraction, and where the idea of global French and the global Francophone has arisen to combat this, David Fieni's I Decadent Orientalisms i provides a needed example of what scholarship in this new comparative, multidirectional disciplinarity might look like. Fieni's postcolonial examples mark how writers react creatively and critically against the discourse of decadence in ways that reveal the philological history of Orientalist discourses. [Extracted from the article]