David Fieni

SUNY Oneonta, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Faculty Member

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DAVID FIENI is Associate Professor of French at the State University of New York, Oneonta. He is the author of Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity (Fordham University Press, 2020), and the translator of Laurent Dubreuil’s Empire of Language (Cornell University Press, 2013). Fieni has co-edited special journal issues on “The Global Checkpoint” and on the Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi. His work has appeared Diacritics, Boundary2, PMLA, and Expressions Maghrébines.

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Galen Strawson

The University of Texas at Austin

Renzo Taddei

Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)

Devin Singh

Dartmouth College

Na'ama Pat-El

The University of Texas at Austin

Justin Stearns

New York University Abu Dhabi

Zoe Ververopoulou

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Benjamin Isakhan

Deakin University

Richard P Martin

Stanford University

Andrea Peto

Central European University

Martin van Bruinessen

Universiteit Utrecht

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Books by David Fieni

Decadent Orientalisms The Decay of Colonial Modernity

Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have fo... more Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West.

Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.

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Papers by David Fieni

Decadent Orientalisms

Genet’s The Screens as Media Allegory

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2006

While the Algerian War and the question of decolonization furnish the obvious political referents... more While the Algerian War and the question of decolonization furnish the obvious political referents for Jean Genet’s The Screens, there is a hidden politics at work in the text, which is focused on mass media technology and consumerism. In order to explore this important, though neglected, relationship, this essay rethinks Genet’s final play in the social and historical context of a post-war France grappling with the twin forces of decolonization and rapid modernization. The swift rise of consumer culture in France during the 1950s and 1960s, as Kristin Ross argues (1995), constituted a concerted attempt to cleanse the ‘stain’ of Algeria from French national consciousness. The proliferation of inexpensive consumables and durable goods, along with the emergence of new forms of mass media, helped France to forget the loss of its colonial empire and the especially horrendous episode of the Algerian War. While The Screens is not a political play in any simple sense, as Genet himself stressed in numerous comments, to divorce it from the specific context in which it was created and first performed obscures Genet’s particular notion of the political, and his unique conception of ‘political’ theatre.

The Profound Complicity of George Batailie's Blue of Noon

Paroles gelées, 2003

Paroles Gelees was established in 1983 by its founding editor. Kathrjn Bailey. The journal is man... more Paroles Gelees was established in 1983 by its founding editor. Kathrjn Bailey. The journal is managed and edited by the French Graduate Students" Association and published annualK under the auspices of the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. Information regarding the submission of articles and subscriptions is available from the

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Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

This chapter shows how al-Shidyaq’s novel, Al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq (Leg Over Leg), produces a radical ... more This chapter shows how al-Shidyaq’s novel, Al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq (Leg Over Leg), produces a radical critique of the supposed philological decadence of the Arabic language. The text does this through a carnivalization of Arabic, where the author generates the kind of ambivalence that is constitutive of the category of grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s account of the carnivalesque. By articulating the subaltern status of Arabs under Ottoman rule in a language marked by dynamism, excess, and proliferation, al-Shidyaq is able to make powerlessness and disease signify awakening and renaissance. The novel challenges the Eurocentric origins of the novelistic form while simultaneously disproving, in raucous fashion, both the Orientalist thesis of the decadence of Semitic languages and cultures and the self-diagnosis of the Arab nahda that sought to cleanse Arabic of tradition to modernize it.

From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline’s Anti-Semitic Style

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

Orientalist philology brought people deemed Semitic together under the rubric of Semitism, and it... more Orientalist philology brought people deemed Semitic together under the rubric of Semitism, and it subsequently broke up this forced grouping into the distinct categories of Jew, Arab, and Muslim. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the Dreyfus Affair exacerbated tensions between Jews, Muslims, and European residents of French colonial Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century. It explores the history of philological Semitism, discusses the legal status of Jews and Muslims in Algeria, and summarizes how the Dreyfus Affair affected Algerian politics and business. In order to think through the stylistics of French colonial anti-Semitism, the chapter examines pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish texts from the Algerian press of the 1890s. It ends with a close reading of Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre, demonstrating the way that popular literary philology reveals a lasting fracture between Jews, Arabs, and Muslims, while also exposing a process of psychological minoritization of the French majority population.

Virtual Secularization

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

This chapter examines the knot of meanings that have been attributed to the mobile Arab body and ... more This chapter examines the knot of meanings that have been attributed to the mobile Arab body and Arabic script in post-9/11 Orientalist Islamophobic fantasy. A reading of Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano and Phantasia demonstrates how the body of the Arab immigrant or traveler becomes the field of battle upon which the ideological conflicts of Orientalism’s decaying discourses are played out. Meddeb’s work is analyzed in relation to Nietzsche’s revisions of the concept of decadence and the body, as well as critical frames from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Pierre Klossowski, Dina al-Kassim, Michel de Certeau, and Réda Bensmaïa. Meddeb injects Arabic and Islamic techniques of circulation into networks of power inherent within the postcolonial nation-state to enact a kind of virtual secularization, meaning a translation of Islamic cultural practices from Arabic into French. His work produces a postcolonial urbanism that conveys the overlapping chronotopes of the flâneur and the médinant (an idler in the Arab médina), leaving only the trace of an itinerary

Chapter 1. French decadence, Arab awakenings: figures of decay in the nahda

Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

French Decadence, Arab Awakenings

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

Chapter 1 does a comparative reading of French theories of philological decadence and Arabic and ... more Chapter 1 does a comparative reading of French theories of philological decadence and Arabic and Islamic accounts of reformism and modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the secular philosophy of history of French Orientalist Ernest Renan, which both denies the very existence of decadence as a useful category of analysis and simultaneously constructs the Semite as inherently decadent. Renan’s 1883 debate with Persian reformist intellectual Jamal al-din al-Afghani demonstrates how European Orientalism set the terms for discussions of modernity but also how al-Afghani’s response partially defamiliarizes the categories of thought that frame the debate itself. The chapter ends with an exploration of two Arabic analyses of Arab decadence by Farah Antun and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, who, along with al-Afghani, constitute a mode of “nomad thought” that contrasts markedly with Renan’s self-satisfied and self-centering diagnosis of Oriental decadence.

From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline’s Anti-Semitic Style

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

French Decadence, Arab Awakenings

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Chapter 1. French decadence, Arab awakenings: figures of decay in the nahda

Virtual Secularization

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Khatibi's Graffiti: The Gestural Aesthetics of Writing on Language

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Mar 1, 2022

Toward a Contrapuntal Double Critique of Colonial Modernity

Decadent Orientalisms

While some postcolonial critics have championed Abdelkebir Khatibi’s notion of “double critique” ... more While some postcolonial critics have championed Abdelkebir Khatibi’s notion of “double critique” over Edward Said’s method of “contrapuntal reading” (Lionnet), this conclusion argues for a novel way of combining these two approaches. Khatibi’s elaboration of the intersign and his deployment of the intersemiotic in his work illustrate a way of reading both the positive and negative signs of the decay of colonial modernity, while also gauging the spaces and intervals between them. Saidian contrapuntal reading allows critics to account for the historical sedimentation of knowledge and how it is built up in specific languages but not in others. Contrapuntal double critique, then, can deconstruct the oppositions constitutive of the field of imperialist discourse without disabling oppositional, anti-imperialist critique. The conclusion outlines Khatibi’s transcolonial Maghrebi traveling theory, which is explored in his writing on Jean Genet and in the explication of his own novel Un Été à...

Algerian Women and the Invention of Literary Mourning

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

This chapter revisits the gendering of loss in discourses of decadence through an exploration of ... more This chapter revisits the gendering of loss in discourses of decadence through an exploration of four texts by Algerian authors. Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-Jasad (Memory of the Body), Yamina Méchakra’s La Grotte éclatée (The Blasted Cave), Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Algerian White), and Hélène Cixous’s Si près (So Close) each produce spontaneous, singular forms of female solidarity in the face of institutional expectations relating to language, religion, and the state that overdetermine the value of women’s social work of remembering and forgetting. The chapter explores these four texts in light of psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia and also a certain injunction of postcolonial theory that would impose permanent melancholia on postcolonial writing and thought. These texts experiment with inventive modes of literary mourning, from the “female grotesque” (Mary Russo) to a range of syntactic elaborations, which propose a different cure for postcolonial melancholia and open the possibility of a “melancholia of the public sphere” (Judith Butler).

Orientalist Decadence

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

The introduction presents an overview of the ways that theories and representations of decadence ... more The introduction presents an overview of the ways that theories and representations of decadence and decay have functioned in the relationship between France and the Arab world since the nineteenth century. Bringing the ideas of Walter Benjamin to bear on the Arab nahda, Islamic reformism, and Orientalist philology, it elaborates a theory of historical awakening as mutual defamiliarization. The introduction concludes by demonstrating how the anti-Semitic Orientalism of Ernest Renan fabricated the “Orient” as an object of knowledge that carried within it the mechanisms of its own undoing.

Graffiti and street art in Paris

Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Decadent Orientalisms

This book explores the confluence of decadence and Orientalism since the mid-nineteenth century i... more This book explores the confluence of decadence and Orientalism since the mid-nineteenth century in French and Arabic writing. It demonstrates how French Orientalism set the terms of modernity for Arab and Muslim thinkers and writers, but also how the latter responded to and transformed these terms. The book argues that Orientalism is doubly decadent: it describes the supposedly inherent degeneration of the Semitic and the “Oriental,” and in so doing Orientalism attempts to contribute to the decay of these societies. Through comparative close readings of French, Francophone, and Arabic texts, the author outlines how notions and representations of decadence and decay during the colonial and postcolonial periods have in fact produced symbolic and social disintegration in parts of the Arab world. Part 1 of the book examines the role of philology, secularism, Islamic reformism, and colonial policy in the configurations of colonial modernity during the second half of the nineteenth centur...

Decadent Orientalisms The Decay of Colonial Modernity

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Decadent Orientalisms

Genet’s The Screens as Media Allegory

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2006

The Profound Complicity of George Batailie's Blue of Noon

Paroles gelées, 2003

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Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline’s Anti-Semitic Style

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

Virtual Secularization

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

Chapter 1. French decadence, Arab awakenings: figures of decay in the nahda

Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

French Decadence, Arab Awakenings

Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 7, 2020

From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline’s Anti-Semitic Style

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

French Decadence, Arab Awakenings

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Chapter 1. French decadence, Arab awakenings: figures of decay in the nahda

Virtual Secularization

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Khatibi's Graffiti: The Gestural Aesthetics of Writing on Language

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Mar 1, 2022

Toward a Contrapuntal Double Critique of Colonial Modernity

Decadent Orientalisms

Algerian Women and the Invention of Literary Mourning

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Orientalist Decadence

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Graffiti and street art in Paris

Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Decadent Orientalisms

Resurrecting Colonial Decadence in Independent Algeria

Decadent Orientalisms, 2020

Chapter 4 proposes re-reading the language politics of the Algerian Civil War through the lens of... more Chapter 4 proposes re-reading the language politics of the Algerian Civil War through the lens of Orientalist modes of evaluating language. It offers a summary of the conditions prevailing during the period of Arabization and its relation to Algerian society and the Algerian economy. This is followed by a comparative reading of Tahir Wattar’s Arabic novel, Al-Zilzal (The Earthquake) (1974), and Tahar Djout’s French novel, L’Invention du désert (The Invention of the Desert) (1987), which both develop a postcolonial critique of the concept of decadence. By narrating the Algerian present through the degenerating consciousness of two figures embodying a highly paternalistic understanding of Islamic tradition, these novels trace the limits of the role of French and Arabic in both Algerian national culture and transnational space. A critique of postcolonial decadence emerges that challenges the very idea of the nation in configurations of the loss inscribed within the discourse of decadence.

Empire of Language : Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression

“Francophonocentrism.” “Francophone Futures French Studies Workshop,” Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University, November 16, 2013.

“French Decadence, Arabic Awakenings: Figures of Decay in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Nahda.” “Orientalism and the Invention of World Literatures,” UCLA, May 22, 2010.

“What a Wall Wants, or How Graffiti Thinks: Nomad Grammatology and the Parisian Banlieue.” “Aesthetics of Banlieues,” French Studies Conference. Cornell University, February 6, 2010.

“Graphic (Im)mobility: Graffiti on the Israel-Palestine Border Wall.” “Walls: A Workshop and Colloquium,” Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, October 2, 2010.

“The Political Theater of Jean Genet’s Un captif amoureux.” Les Passions de Jean Genet International Symposium. University of Miami, November 15, 2007.

Dreyfus in the Colony, "Importing/Exporting Racism." Annual Meetting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Seattle, WA. March 28, 2015

As economic factors can be said to lie squarely at the root of racism, racist discourses must con... more As economic factors can be said to lie squarely at the root of racism, racist discourses must constantly draw and redraw their color lines to adapt to the rapidly shifting crises of capital and the anxieties of capitalists. In the case of France and its colonial empire, the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) remains a watershed moment in which the features of modern anti-Semitism came to be fully outlined and widely disseminated in a variety of maliciously playful cultural forms. It is also with the l'Affaire Dreyfus -- specifically as it played out in the colony during a period of economic upheaval -- that what Edward Said called "the Semitic object" is made to turn on itself, so to speak, planting seeds of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism among other peoples deemed "Semites" -- the so-called indigènes of Algeria, effecting what we might productively term a genetic mutation of racist discourse. This paper examines pamphlets, burlesques, and poems published in Oran and Algiers between 1895 and 1899 in order to show how a specifically European form of anti-Jewish racism is imported from France during this period. My analysis will also provide an opportunity to reconsider subsequent flash-points in the history of the volatile semiotics of anti-Semitism in France and the francophone world, especially in relation to Céline and Jean Genet, as well as contemporary humorist Dieudonné.

“Tagging the Jasmine Revolution: Social Media and Graffiti in the Tunisian Uprising.” “Writing the Jasmine Revolution and Tahrir Square: Graffiti, Film, Collage, Poetry,” MLA seminar, Seattle, January 5, 2012.

“Postcolonial Decadence and National Loss.” “Maghrebi Writing and the Unfungibles of World Literature(s),” co-organizer and presenter at the ACLA Annual Meeting in Vancouver, B.C., April 1, 2011.

“Flâneurs, Médinants, and Mobile Property in the Maghrebi City.” Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) Annual Meeting, San Diego, November 21, 2010.

“Virtual Secularization: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Post-9/11 Transnational Maghrebi Textuality.” “Narratives of 9/11: The Maghreb and its Diasporas,” MLA seminar, Chicago, December 30, 2007.

“Reformism, Secularism and Authenticity in the Renan-al-Afghani Debate.” UCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Student Colloquium, June 2, 2006.

“Language as a Symptom of Social Vitality in al-Shidyaq and Céline.” “Language, Ideology, and the Human,” ACLA seminar at Princeton University, March 25, 2006.

“A Poetics of Postcolonial Decadence: Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Walking Cure.” NYU, French Graduate Student Conference, February 24, 2006.

“Les Paravents as an Old Allegory on New Media.” Genet in Performance Symposium, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. October 17, 2003.

“The Profound Complicity of Georges Bataille’s Le bleu du ciel.” UCLA Department of French & Francophone Studies Conference. Los Angeles, October 12, 2002.

Review of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s “Class Warrior – Taoist Style”

This review demonstrates the way that Khatibi’s poem configures the political in relation to his ... more This review demonstrates the way that Khatibi’s poem configures the political in relation to his singular poetics. In particular, it shows how the author’s idiosyncratic understanding of class, the “class warrior,” and the “class enemy” dramatize a combat that links language, thought, society, and the body in the creation of a permanent critique inspired by anticolonialism and Marxist thought, but also deforming Marx through the “Taoist Style” announced in the title.

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