Review] Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry

doi:10.14324/111.1755-4527.102

Abstract

Highlights

Taking its title from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Stilling’s study posits that the artists, poets and thinkers of postcolonial nations and their diaspora risked following what Fanon identified as the West’s ‘path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention’.2 As such, they necessarily find themselves ‘beginning at the end’, and run the risk of ‘skipping the inventive phase of youth for a premature senility’
Robert Stilling’s Beginning at the End sidesteps this entire dilemma by confidently arguing for a more inclusive decadence: a transnational phenomenon not situated in any particular place or time but rather as work produced under ‘the tectonic friction between rising and falling empires’
That while many anglophone postcolonial artists have deliberately engaged with fin-de-siècle decadent writers in their work, the resultant texts are anything but prematurely senile

Summary

Introduction

Taking its title from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Stilling’s study posits that the artists, poets and thinkers of postcolonial nations and their diaspora risked following what Fanon identified as the West’s ‘path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention’.2 As such, they necessarily find themselves ‘beginning at the end’, and run the risk of ‘skipping the inventive phase of youth for a premature senility’.3.

Results

Conclusion