Decadent Provocations

Mitchell, Rebecca N.; Mitchell, Rebecca N.

We propose an expanded notion of decadence that permits consideration of diverse authors and artists without having to always place them within a discourse of influence rooted in nineteenth-century canonical British and French works. We recognize non-British decadent literatures inspired by their own unique situated knowledge and geographic and cultural conflicts. We argue for foregrounding the presence of other decadences beyond the confines of the late-nineteenth century, aesthetic practices that carry forward the queer concerns of the fin de siècle while doing much more than replicating that past. Our panel will attend to modes of modernist practice that, rather than simply citing or echoing Wilde and Beardsley, remake decadence as something new. We will affirm the need to theorize new ways of understanding popularization and canonicity, moving beyond the subversive/hegemonic lens and other formulations that inadvertently privilege certain historical moments, individuals, locations, and values. To an extent, we aim to expand the canon by continuing to search for underrepresented or ignored voices, languages, and modes. But, more pressingly, we seek to reconfigure how we can understand decadence as a theoretical, aesthetic, and political phenomenon, rather than as a historical set of modified tropes. As such, our approach takes inspiration from decadence itself, which (to our understanding) disrupts bourgeois notions of productive futurity and insists instead on the multi-threaded tendencies of history.

To put into practice our claim that there are multiple conceptual threads to any history, we will conduct the session in a format we are calling a “shuffleboard”: each of the four panelists will speak for a strict five minutes on one aspect of the decadent stance, then deliver a prepared, two-minute response to one of the other talks. The remainder of the session will be dedicated to extensive discussion between panelists, presider, and attendees about the possibilities of decadence as a political methodology (see Format Description for more details).

In “Decadence and Empire in the Hawaiian Kingdom,” Lindsay Wilhelm discusses the emergence of decadent rhetorics and practices in late nineteenth-century Hawai’i, focusing particularly on the writings of Hawai’i’s last monarchs. Her talk, inspired by the animating impulses of this panel, puts aside questions of influence, co-option, and subversion and instead considers Hawaiian decadence on its own terms, as a distinct tradition shaped by the islands’ unique status as both settler colony and aspiring empire.

Kristin Mahoney’s paper on “Cross-Channel Decadence and Camp Modernism” attends to the manner in which camp modernists in the early-twentieth century expressed dissatisfaction with the very discourses of influence which this panel seeks to trouble. While camp modernists certainly sought to engender a mode of queer modernist aesthetics that paralleled the political potency of their fin-de-siècle precursors, they also actively derided peers that they perceived as engaging in forms of tired and hollow decadent mimicry. This paper then endeavors to work away from conventional modes of tracing decadent influence by foregrounding the manner in which camp modernists endeavored to revivify and reimagine, rather than simply repeat, late-Victorian decadence.

In “Radical Vegetality and Queer Futurity,” Dennis Denisoff engages with the queer ecological visions of Vernon Lee’s and Ronald Fraser’s decadent prose. Both authors, he argues, conceptualize the ecological as the circulation of affect that then gives rise to the individual’s sense of personalized sentience. Scenes of vital flourishing, in Lee’s and Fraser’s works, operate not in conflict with procreative biological models but, rather, with a disregard for productivist values in general. The decentering of the human that is part of their ecological visions suggests alternatives to the queer negativity that Lee Edelman has championed as a challenge to the procreative futurity underlying much of contemporary Western queer identity politics.

Dustin Friedman’s “Toward a Decadent Humanism” also seeks an alternative to queer negativity. Queer theorists have derided André Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name (2007) and the film it inspired for pandering to liberal-humanist sensibilities through prettified depictions of love between men. Yet the novel’s Italian setting, preoccupation with myth, and cross-generational romance reimagine the Hellenic homoeroticism of Uranian decadence. By doing so, Aciman’s novel challenges queer skepticism of romantic love and humanist subjectivity by redeeming erotic desire for an illiberal humanism, one that carries counterhegemonic force by remaining steadfast to its object in the face of social interdictions regardless of the attainability, or even the reality, of the object itself.

250V Decadent Provocations: Calls for Papers