Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka and Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism

Abstract

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.