Call for Papers
“The idea of the universe as decoration, of course, comes from Black people, and the idea survives even after the ransacking and incineration of our libraries and palaces . . .”
—Shola Von Reinhold, LOTE (2020)
Image: “Prospero’s Monsters,” Yinka Shonibare, 2008. Photo by J-No.
“Global Decadence, Race, and the Futures of Decadence Studies” is a conference that aims to connect those who are working on any aspect of Decadence so that they can share their research or artistic projects with the field, learn from one another, and discuss the possible futures that the field might take within—and outside of—academia.
Extending the ambitions of the 2018 Transnational Poetics: Aestheticism and Decadence at the Fin de Siècle symposium organised by Jane Desmarais, Kate Hext, and Marion Thain, this deliberately expansive conference invites short papers and presentations related to any and all aspects of Decadence from scholars and artists across the globe, in any time period.
In the process, however, this conference extends a special invitation to papers that focus on the relationship between Decadence and race.
Recent academic work such as Robin Mitchell’s Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-century France (2020), Grace Lavery’s Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (2019), and Robert Stilling’s Beginning at the end: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (2018), as well as novels such as Shola Von Reinhold’s LOTE (2020), all suggest that artists and writers of color within and outside of Euro-America were just as much involved in the development of Decadent art and culture as their white counterparts.
How, then, does their presence within and beyond the nineteenth century revise our understanding of what Decadence is—as an aesthetic movement, a political position, and/or a historical period?
How might reinventions, or new versions, of Decadence from fields like African and African-American studies, Asian and Asian-American studies, Caribbean studies, Latina/o/x studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial theory dislodge European Decadence as the universal yardstick for measuring and understanding what Decadence is and why it matters?
Established scholars as well as graduate students, early career researchers, independent researchers, and artists are welcome to submit a paper or project that they would like to share. Provisional, experimental, and wildly fantastical provocations are just as welcome as papers and projects that extend more established lines of inquiry.
In addition to panels that will offer academic paper presentations about Decadence, we will also host panels where creative writers and artists can share their work and discuss the role that Decadence has played in their creative practice.
Attendance and registration for the conference is free. While plenary speakers and roundtable participants will receive a customary honorarium, graduate students, artists, and independent scholars who present a paper will also receive compensation. The sum will be modest, but it is intended to address the economic disparities in our profession and show appreciation for the valuable intellectual labour that we all do.
Deadline: January 31, 2023
Click here to submit your abstract
Contact the conference chair, Cherrie Kwok (mk7kf@virginia.edu) if you have any questions.
Possible Paper Topics Might Include:
Anti-imperial, postcolonial, or “undisciplined” forms of Decadence.
Given the long-standing association between European Decadence, imperialism, and Orientalism, how do artists and writers of color use, reinvent, or “undiscipline” Decadent aesthetic styles or tropes like decay, degeneration, and more? How do they understand or reconstruct their own relationship to Empire or postcolonial politics when they use Decadent styles in their work? What do they gain, what do they risk, and why do their contributions matter?
Global, world, planetary, or local Decadence.
Decadence is a deeply nuanced concept, but so is the term “global” and affiliated concepts like “world,”“planet,”and “local.”What does the term “global” constitute in the phrase Global Decadence? How do conceptions of the globe and globality in Decadent art and literature shift depending on the geographical location of the art object or the racial, ethnic, and cultural background of the artist and/or writer? And how might other terms like World Decadence, Planetary Decadence, Local Decadence, and more, reconceptualize our understanding of Decadence more broadly?
Circulation, reception, and translation of Decadent art and texts.
How are racial identities in Decadent texts translated, understood, undone, or remade as they travel across different languages, cultures, and nations? How do the racial identities of a global or local readership influence how they read a Decadent text or encounter Decadent art?
Aestheticism, beauty, excess, sensuality.
European decadents and aesthetes have already pontificated at length about beauty, but how have artists and writers of color constructed other understandings of the beautiful? How have they reclaimed or transformed the power of artifice, eroticism, excess, sensuality, pleasure, self-indulgence?
Decadent queerness and sexual dissonance.
What happens when queerness and queer sexualities interact with racial identities in Decadent art, literature, and politics? How do the two inflect, reinforce, undo, or play with one another, and what can we learn from these experimentations?
Decadence in everyday art, digital platforms, periodicals, theatre, and popular literature.
What types of Decadence thrive outside of the auspices of the ivory tower or the mansions of wealthy elites, and how do they engage with topics like race and racial identity? What does the departure from the genres and forms that constitute high-brow Decadence make possible?
Decadence before, during, and after the 19C.
How can we work within and against the whitewashed archives of the nineteenth century as we develop research and projects about Decadence? How might accounting for Decadent artists, writers, or communities of color dislodge the late nineteenth century as the exclusive origin or center of Decadent art and literature? What does Decadence look like across time?
Decadent pedagogies.
How might the pedagogical frames used to teach Decadence shift depending on the socioeconomic and racial backgrounds that comprise different classrooms around the world? How can we teach topics about Decadence without losing what makes Decadence, well, Decadence: messy, excessive, “perverse,” fragmentary, self-indulgent, irreverent?
Global Decadence, Race, the Futures of Decadence Studies 