Review: Robert Stilling, Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Abstract

Is Decadence the end or the beginning of a series of existential concerns about personal identity, nationhood, and literary tradition? Robert Stilling’s Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry addresses this important and long-overdue question. He establishes Western Decadence as a crucial model and foundation to postcolonial poetics. Decadence, Stilling argues, served eminent poets and artists such as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo as a springboard to shape their countries’ own poetics either by adapting or rejecting the Decadent writings of prominent nineteenth-century figures such as J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Stilling’s study considers a wide range of postcolonial (European (Irish), South Asian, African, and Caribbean) narratives. He champions the idea of Decadence as an innovative force, one of cultural renovation. Put more figuratively, he considers Decadence as metaphor describing the ‘death in birth’ (p. 36) of the emergence of postcolonial aesthetics. For many writers ‘the postcolonial nation begins in a state of artistic decadence, a decadence not simply imported from the West but composed of those backward-looking elements of indigenous traditions exaggerated by the colonizers’ (p. 63).