Abstract
ABSTRACT The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. World-historically, this was the emergence of self-governing dominions of Anglophone cultures, increasing US influence, and decolonization. Eighty-five states gained independence since 1922, with the African nation-states after 1956. While nationalist projects often deferred the Woman Question, liberal projects of New Womanism initiated debate between feminist individualism and more collectivist practices and ideologies. Movements like social Darwinism and eugenics impacted on women, and in terms of deformed relations of part to whole (a classic definition of decadence), modernization included the great unification movements of the “Pans” – Pan-Hellenism, -Islamism, -Asianism, -Africanism, and Zionism – but also the partitions of India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel, the PRC/Taiwan, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, and Cyprus, which often impacted women unequally. Under processes of globalization and nation-building, modernization and expressions of decadence have been in dialectical relations, though the meanings and targets shift as hegemons rise and fall.
Highlights
In the many recent online academic speaker series on decadence during the COVID-19 pandemic – Exeter’s Zooming Decadence, NAVSA’s, BADS’, Vernon Lee Society’s, inter alia – decadence usually appears as a practice of looking at, reifying, fetishizing others’ worlds; a mood of looking nostalgically at one’s own declining world; and a practice of performing, parodying, and imitating, including commercial opportunism
Movements like social Darwinism and eugenics impacted on women, and in terms of deformed relations of part to whole, modernization included the great unification movements of the “Pans” – Pan-Hellenism, -Islamism, -Asianism, -Africanism, and Zionism – and the partitions of India/ Pakistan, Palestine/Israel, the People’s Republic of China (PRC)/Taiwan, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, and Cyprus, which often impacted women unequally
Under processes of globalization and nation-building, modernization and expressions of decadence have been in dialectical relations, though the meanings and targets shift as hegemons rise and fall
Summary
I begin with a recent work of looking at, reifying, fetishizing, and commercial opportunism that demonstrates some of the themes of decadence. The Nahdah, or Arab Renaissance, focused attention on reified (Islamic) tradition and reified (Western) technique Adūnīs concedes that it was Western decadents who taught him to perceive the modern innovators in historical Islam: “I find no paradox in declaring that it was recent Western modernity [Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Nerval, Breton] which led me to discover our own, older, modernity.” Adūnīs takes us to places beyond dichotomies, asking whether language is a tool or an end in itself, an instrument for knowledge production and acquisition or something that “precedes thought and is succeeded by knowledge.” Such questions go deeper than false antinomies of Eurocentric modernity and reactive essential “tradition.” Adūnīs understood the colonial imposition of “consumerist forms” as contributing to “an obliteration of personality; [...] a borrowed mind, a borrowed life. Modern China, in particular, shows that decadence is an epithet “that relies entirely on the norm it implicitly calls up” and shifts as cultures and ideologies shift
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