Decadence Today: Volutes, Unfurling Flowers, and Decolonial Excesses in Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE and Thuy On’s Decadence

1 Introduction

Decadence studies typically draws from British and French fin de siècle literatures produced by men when citing the most canonical motifs of aesthetic excess, especially excess understood as adornment, ornamentation, and opulence. From the tortoise that des Esseintes crushes to death by placing copious jewels onto his shell in Huysman’s À Rebours/Against Nature (1884) to the overwhelming odor of roses in Basil Hallward’s luxurious lodgings in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), aesthetic excess for these writers conveyed a rejection of naturalism or became queer desire’s billowing code.

Yet the aesthetic excesses in fin de siècle literatures also developed a fraught relationship with European imperialism and the era’s racializing discourses.^[1] For instance, the guests at des Esseintes’s eerily lavish funerary party are not only treated to mounds of black pudding, caviar, chocolate, and dramatic black cutlery and draping, they are also waited on by “des négresses nues” (Huysmans 1920, p. 14). The imagery implicitly associates nude Black women with the dark foods and adornments on the table, laid out for French ravishment. Similarly, Hallward and Dorian Gray decorate their respective homes with ornaments from Central Asia, East Asia, and South Asia that have circulated to London through imperial trade routes, such as Persian saddlebags, Delhi muslins, and Chinese hangings.

No wonder, then, that an air of suspicion has hung around aesthetic excess since the late nineteenth century, for so much of it evinces a fetishization of Blackness and the imperial plundering of Asia. Yet in recent years, writers have self-consciously engaged with aesthetic excess outside of the imperialist terms that the male fin de siècle decadents have set. This essay examines two of them: Scottish-Nigerian novelist Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE (2020) and Vietnamese-Australian poet Thuy On’s Decadence (2021). The ensuing sections do not attempt to be exhaustive reports about these texts (an impossibility given this special issue’s constraints): rather, they argue that the texts contain a few motifs for developing decolonial understandings about aesthetic excess, and explore how these motifs contribute to the global turn in decadence studies.^[2]

2 Decoloniality and Excess

Decoloniality is a multifaceted concept, ranging from the demand for the material return of Indigenous land to delinking from epistemological frameworks drawn from western modernity’s Enlightenment philosophies and imperial mindsets.^[3] Since von Reinhold’s and On’s texts make aesthetic contributions to decolonial discourse, this section briefly discusses the relationship between decoloniality and the aesthetic motif that they engage with: excess.

Enslaved and colonized peoples and their descendants have a fraught relationship to excess in that the western gaze has typically perceived such peoples as ontologically excessive from the first instance, regardless of whether they are aesthetically excessive (that is, adorned) or not. This gaze inflects some European literary movements to varying degrees, including fin de siècle decadence. For instance, one need only to return to the implicit association between nude Black women and dark foods and drapery in À Rebours to glean how Blackness becomes associated with ontological as well as aesthetic excess – exceeding on one hand the boundaries of what constitutes the human, and, on the other, aesthetically excessive in that denuded Blackness itself becomes adornment for the French dinner party. The issue deepens in Dorian Gray, when Mrs. Vandeleur asks Lord Henry Wotton about the British Empire’s responsibilities to the enslaved. He releases a campy laugh, asserting that “the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy” (Wilde 1918, p. 52, emphasis mine). Not only is Blackness ontologically and aesthetically excessive, then, but any ethical attachment between the (European) self and Blackness is perceived as an expense so extravagant that it warrants dismissal.

To Christina Sharpe’s point that the global legacies of enslavement and imperialism are “a past that is not past” (2016], p. 13), the associations between Blackness and excess with respect to fin de siècle decadence reverberate in refracted forms in the twenty-first century, with the most recent example being Derek Chauvin’s reckless killing of George Floyd in 2020 and ensuing protests around the world for racial justice. In the face of continual disregard for Black life within and outside of the United States, David Marriott wryly remarks that today’s activist mantra – Black Lives Matter – is a “scandalous, even decadent claim characterized […] by excess or luxury” (2017], n.pag.), since contemporary anti-Blackness functions precisely by perceiving the preservation and maintenance of Black life as an over-expenditure.

Similarly, Asians – particularly East Asian women – suffer from associations with excess. Anne Anlin Cheng has traced how the rise of Orientalism and anti-Asian legislation in the nineteenth century led to ambivalent associations between Asiatic femininity and aesthetic and sexual excess, a concept that she coins as ornamentalism. An Asian woman in the western imaginary, she explains, has become both a person and a thing: “an object-person who is radically undone yet luminously constructed – that is meticulously and aesthetically composed yet degraded and disposable” (Cheng 2019, p. 1). Among her examples of ornamentalism are the novels of British and French fin de siècle men such as Huysmans and Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley’s well-known Salomé illustrations (Cheng 2019, pp. 7–13).

The dynamics that Cheng describes reverberate today in a refracted form, from the global anti-Asian racism during and after the COVID-19 pandemic to Robert Aaron Long’s murders in Atlanta in 2021, which rocked the Asian American community and the global Asian diaspora. Six of the eight victims were immigrant women of East Asian descent: Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Suncha Kim, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, and Yong Ae Yue. Long justified his murders by claiming that he was battling sex addiction and wanted to assist other evangelical Christian men undergoing similar predicaments. As the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department said after the women’s deaths, he was apparently “at the end of his rope […] it was a really bad day for him […]” (Chappell and Romo 2021, n.pag.). Under the western gaze (inflected as it is by evangelical Christianity), East Asian femininity is the epitome of aesthetic beauty and sexual desire, yet so much so that it becomes a disturbing ontological excess.

The grim realities outlined above prompt one to wonder what kind of power aesthetic excess can offer. If one is already perceived as ontologically excessive, why would one then pursue more excess in the aesthetic vein – adornment, ornamentation, opulence? Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment (2020]) offers some preliminary clues. Her work concentrates on working-class Black and Latina girls in Florida’s juvenile justice system who are continually perceived as “emotionally, corporeally, and sexually excessive” (Hernandez 2020, p. 15) under the white American gaze, and are thus condemned to “mass incarceration, detention, deportation, and other forms of social death” (Hernandez 2020, p. 11). She goes on to ask how and why such girls would, under these conditions, embrace aesthetic excess.

Interestingly, what constitutes aesthetic excess for Hernandez and the girls in her study are adornments that do not reflect an empire’s wealth: elaborately painted nails; large hoop earrings; glittery make-up; dramatic hairstyles. She finds that the girls embrace these ornamentations not to chase assimilation, legibility, legitimacy, or social status, but to delink from white American discourses of austerity, aesthetic regulation, and respectability politics that are continually imposed onto them. Flaunting their difference and indulging in their self-image, they are driven by “erotic desires, aesthetic traditions, community belonging, or expressions of agency and resistance to white bourgeois norms of embodiment, style, and consumption” (Hernandez 2020, p. 19).

The girls in Hernandez’s study help us see how the imperial scale (see Denisoff 2021) of aesthetic excess in fin de siècle decadence is only one out of the many available ways that aesthetic excess might express itself. The ensuing sections examine how, like those in Hernandez’s study, von Reinhold’s LOTE and On’s Decadence shift the terms of what constitutes aesthetic excess and its purposes by examining its presence and power across the scale of the everyday; the scale of the working-class or the marginalized; and at the scale of institutionalized sites such as the archive and the literary canon.

3 Von Reinhold’s Volutes

Awarded the 2021 James Tait Black Prize in the United Kingdom, von Reinhold’s LOTE follows a Black protagonist, Mathilda Adamarola, who is volunteering in London’s National Portrait Gallery Archive. The novel depicts Mathilda’s attempt to trace the textual and visual fragments of Hermia Druitt – a forgotten Black and queer modernist poet with a penchant for artifice, opulence, and gender-bending. Fragments of Hermia gleam amidst the archival documents about the vibrant Bright Young Things of the 1920s – a group of artists and writers in London, which included Stephen Tennant and Virginia Woolf. Mathilda’s preoccupation with Druitt (which she calls her “transfixions”) lead her to an artist’s residency in the small European town of Dun, where Druitt apparently lived for a time. She finds that the unimaginative emphases on aesthetic and affective minimalism, hyperproductivity, and hyperconformity amongst the predominantly white residency’s coterie (epitomized by their obsession with unbuttered toast) convey the worst mannerisms that have resulted from the art world’s toxic affair with neoliberal capitalism and Eurocentrism. All of it zaps Mathilda’s spirit until she encounters Erskine-Lily.

Decked in rococo heels and luminous fabrics that reveal a flash of brown thigh, Erskine-Lily has examined the same archival fragments about Hermia that Mathilda found. They have also discovered a larger artistic group that Druitt may have been a part of, with Tennant and the Harlem Renaissance’s iconic gay artist and writer, Richard Bruce Nugent: the “Lote-Os,” named after the Lotus Eaters as a nod to the group’s queer and hedonistic leanings, and their loose proximity to the fin de siècle aestheticism and decadence movements. Mathilda and Erskine-Lily continue to unravel the secrets of Dun for the rest of the novel – indulging in alcohol and ornamentation; debating the colonial politics of western archives; and bonding over transqueer temporalities, all while navigating various betrayals from friends and institutions.

LOTE has already provoked multiple discussions in various academic and cultural venues. Carol Jones, for instance, argues that LOTE exhibits a campy “queer trans excess” (2022, p. 63) that challenges heteronormativity and recreates “Black, Scottish, [and] trans, creative life and legacy” (2024], p. 71). Meanwhile, interviews and podcasts have discussed LOTE’s significance across multiple subjects ranging from Black trans joy (Richards 2022) to the influence of Nugent’s lush writing style on the novel (Bateman 2022). Amidst this activity, though, I only want to highlight a central motif in LOTE: its engagement with the volute.

Early in the novel, Mathilda wonders, by way of bell hooks’s critique of Paris is Burning (1990), whether her cravings for adornment, decoration, and ornamentality are forms of white worship.^[4] Her friend Malachi reassures her by arguing that adornment, decoration, and ornamentation were never theirs (white people’s) in the first place. Yet it is Erskine-Lily who later completes that argument in ways that highlight LOTE’s glittering contribution to discourses about decadent aesthetic excess. Glancing at Mathilda’s hair, Erskine-Lily reflects on what they see as fundamental to ornamentation:

The volute, you see, is divine: the sinuous line, the serpentine line, the corolla, the curl, the twist, the whorl, the spiral, and so on, are all related in their volution, convolution, revolution. Volution is the essential and irreducible aspect of ornamentation, just as the phoneme is the smallest irreducible unit of sound in language. Locked into each coil, each curl of ornament, just like the coil and curl of your hair and my hair, darling – Afro hair, as we call it – is the secret salvation of us all […] [t]he universe as decoration, of course, comes from Black people, and the idea survives even after the ransacking and incineration of our libraries and palaces […] (von Reinhold 2022, p. 312–3)

Delinking from fin de siècle understandings of aesthetic excess as the elaborate display of objects drawn from an empire’s wealth, Erskine-Lily highlights ornamentation’s form – the volute – and hints at its potential to torque hegemony. Indeed, the link they draw between volution and revolution finds its basis in Afro curls – an aspect that the western gaze has often attempted to straighten into (white) conformity, yet an aspect that Erskine-Lily retrieves as the origin of beauty.

Centering the volute invites the reader to see that ornamentation, understood in terms of its form, could be found anywhere, in multiple contexts and scales. One example is the way that LOTE handles time through Mathilda’s autobiography. Her autobiography, which she titles “Brief Chronology of Unfurling,” seems like a timeline until one notices that it doesn’t offer concrete dates nor consistent names (von Reinhold 2022, p. 38–41). Instead, it details her elaborate “escapes” – her conversions and reversions from one name to another, adorning herself with one biographical story and the next. Indeed, as von Reinhold has explained, such escapes are part of Mathilda’s transness, which registers more ambiguously than Erskine-Lily’s transness in that it does not operate exclusively as a gender category:

I didn’t want it to be a question of whether Mathilda is trans or not, but that something more could come out of that […] her Escapes […] are also involved in a wider strategy of survival in relation to her queerness, race and class and other relations to the world […] I was thinking of how when people are considered in some way transitional […] there is an expectation to pin down everything else in order to make yourself legible. And I say people considered transitional in some way by society, because that includes undocumented migrants and migrants of various kinds, and multitudinous people who otherwise aren’t as legible to the state or socially […] (Dytor 2021, n.pag.)

Mathilda’s biographical adornments could be read as dishonest. Yet they are more helpfully thought of as epistemic volutes that not only escape the pressures of linearity, legibility, and legitimacy that von Reinhold refers to, but also mirror C. Riley Snorton’s recent assertion that transness is less a fixed gender category than “a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival” – one whose fugitivity intersects with theorizations about Blackness as a site of possibility within and against racial slavery’s logics and its afterlives, rather than a fixed racial category (Snorton 2017, p. 2). After all, in LOTE, Mathilda’s escapes allow her to secure housing, procure food and drink, and gain admission into (or abandon) social circles that she otherwise would have been excluded from. The same is true for other real-world figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, who put down her age as 16 when she was 26 to access educational opportunities that had been denied to her. “I’m looking at these acts in Black artists [Hurston] as a means of pleasure and survival,” von Reinhold has explained, “you could call some of it scamming and fraud if you wanted. I’m interested in these acts as a form of ornamentation, of adorning one’s own life” (Dytor 2021, n.pag.). When faced with anti-Black climates and the legacy of generational wealth that Euro-American families amassed through the slave trade, Mathilda and Hurston’s “scams” are fugitive volutes in the timeline that allow them to revolt against the conditions that they live in. In the process, they epitomize the culmination of a practice that began during the slave trade itself: as Monica Miller argues, the enslaved adorned themselves with jewelry made from the stones retrieved from their place of origin as a gesture of “memory, individuality, and subversion” (2009], p. 4) against their masters. The universe as decoration does, indeed, come from Black people.

Similarly, Mathilda’s transfixions in the novel function as volutions that disrupt the western archive’s linear temporalities, tendrils spreading out from the timeline in order to explore the suppressed multiplicities of identity, history, and culture. When reflecting on various figures in history – often Black, such as Nugent; or often Black and little-known, such as eighteenth-century singer and composer Ardizzoni – Mathilda records the intense sensations that these marginalized figures evoke (“internal fumes/pale blue ethanol” (von Reinhold 2022, p. 76) for Nugent and “nocturnal gilding coats the bones” (von Reinhold 2022, p. 48) for Ardizzoni) for her. Sharing these sensorial experiences with the reader not only centers these figures that the western gaze has marginalized, but also has the effect of torquing the clinical gaze that the west has historically imposed on enslaved and colonized peoples (as exemplified through the legacy of eugenics and the racial sciences), since these transfixions disallow one from perceiving them purely as subjects of academic study. In this way, her transfixions are transfictions that are transing the western archive by throwing its universalizing authority into contingency, echoing theorists who have conceptualized transing as the reassembling of bodies in ways that offer “an escape vector” (Stryker, Currah, and Moore 2008, p. 13) from the demands of fixity.

It is also the volute that frees Erskine-Lily when their former deadname is later revealed to Mathilda without their consent. “Simply because I knew this old name,” Mathilda explains, “even if I didn’t believe in its authority, its precedence, I would reflect it back, through time, from life before” (von Reinhold 2022, p. 456). Where can one go from here? Twirling out of the novel’s own timeline, the conclusion sees Mathilda and Erskine-Lily shedding their names and escaping into other names, other lives – another set of sweeping volutes that swerve away from their former identities and away from the reader’s gaze.

Centering the volute ultimately allows LOTE to stress how adornment, beauty, and ornamentation are not restricted to the mansions of French tortoise killers, but dwell in a variety of contexts, spaces, and objects, and with a multitude of purposes. When discussing LOTE elsewhere, von Reinhold explains that ornamentation.

can be relational, rhetorical, or detached from the material (if anything can). And then, of course, ornamental doesn’t have to be radical either […] it becomes an off-stage world, which can harbour knowledge, histories, and conversations. I always think of the ornamental dimension as this kind of sideways zone, where alterities are going on and seeds of utopia get lodged, different ways of being and experiencing the world, whether this ornament is abstract geometric pattern, braided hair, makeup, music, or poetry […] (Dytor 2021, n.pag.)

Abstract patterns, braided hair – what constitutes their ornamentality are their intricacy, the volutes that shape them and the kinds of knowledge these volutes disclose. In the process, this understanding of aesthetic excess intersects in surprising ways with Christina Sharpe’s study about Black life, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016]). When examining what kind of ethical – rather than spectacularizing – gaze one might adopt when confronted with slews of photographs depicting the suffering of Black people, Sharpe examines a photo of an injured girl in the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. “That leaf,” she writes, “is stuck in her still neat braids. And I think: Somebody braided her hair before that earthquake hit” (Sharpe 2016, p. 120; original emphasis). Attending to her braids – those neat volutes – discloses what the western media’s rote spectacularizing of Black suffering cannot: that she was a valued being who was cared for, tended to, loved. Not fodder for the white western gaze. This is the off-stage world and sideways zone that aesthetic excess understood at the unit of the volute can reveal, the different ways of being that it can disclose.

4 On’s Unfurling Flowers

Longlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize in Australia, the 71 playful poems in Thuy On’s Decadence offer yet another understanding of aesthetic excess that complement, but are also distinct from, LOTE. One poem, “Hyphenated,” (On 2022e) serves as a suggestive starting point – not least because it elicited a dry little laugh from me, but also because it exemplifies how On’s Decadence is working within and against the contradictory associations that have congealed around East Asian femininity in the wake of the histories of imperialism and more immediate contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Atlanta shootings. Anne Anlin Cheng’s point that Asian women are often figured as “object-persons” who are aesthetically ravishing yet ontologically devalued underpin the delicate transmutations that occur in the first quintain of the poem:

Cognitive dissonance is an Asian woman

who has to carry her grandmother’s special phở

in her lukewarm blood to impress at dinner parties,

be after-schooled in strings and numbers

a hothouse orchid with no outside breeze.

(“Hyphenated,” On 2022e, 1–5)

The metaphorical association between the broth in Vietnamese phở and the speaker’s blood dissolves the line between objecthood and personhood, transforming the speaker’s heritage into an exotic token for “impress [ing]” at dinner parties. The speaker’s problem deepens in the next quintain, when she describes how “men […] largely want her for her smallness/the wriggling cheongsam, the flutter fingers/then stillness, bamboo waist and water lily serene” (“Hyphenated,” On 2022e, 6–9). As Cheng has said elsewhere with respect to Chinese women, you don’t really need her there to “achieve her full, sensorial affect: ‘she’ can be involved by the flick of the fan, the swish of silk, the swerve of a dragon, the cool curves of poreless ceramic” in the western imaginary (2024], p. 126). Similarly, the Vietnamese speaker of “Hyphenated” highlights how Orientalist images and assumptions from bamboo and waterlilies to attributes about passivity and fragility underpin the attention that she receives from other men.

The poem’s last quintain raises yet another issue that congeals around Asianness in Australia, where On is writing from, and other predominantly white nations such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom: the model minority myth. The myth describes the western gaze’s tendency to celebrate the accomplishments that Asian immigrants achieve in order to justify withholding resources from other minoritized groups, or to deny the existence of systemic racism. As the poem’s speaker states sardonically, “everyone loves a happy migrant story/leaky prawn trawler to valedictorian […]/she has to blaze a trail to prove she’s keen” (“Hyphenated,” On 2022e, 11–5). The myth invites the Asian to become the western master’s postcolonial pet – a role that is maintained through other stereotypes about Asian tiger parenting (hinted at in the first quintain’s quip about being “after-schooled in strings and numbers”) and the Asian’s apparently robotic endurance toward pain, inherited from Bertrand Russell’s claims that Chinese people are apparently built to “endure torture, even death” (2010], p. 163). Taken together, the myth exerts an impossible demand on Asians to secure their personhood by meeting a grueling standard of perfection, maintaining a suffocating respectability politics, and stoking their master’s self-delusions. It is apt, then, that “Hyphenated” titles itself after the hyphen, for what other punctuation mark captures the experience of being split into so many different pieces that are at the same time forcibly conjoined to a single body?

To the point that “Hyphenated” makes about the way that East Asian women live like a “hothouse orchid with no outside breeze,” then, there is little space for her in predominantly white societies to stretch out; to dance; to indulge in her beauty, her sensuality, and her life in ways that serve herself and the complexities that she embodies – whether it be at a dinner party or at a publishing house, where the industry’s fetishization of difference is also an issue that On considers. This is why the rest of Decadence is such a gift: split into three sections titled “Meta,” “Physical,” and “Space,” the bulk of the poems establish a wide and imaginative meta/physical/space – some outside breeze – for the orchid to bloom. Decadence fashions irreverent speakers who banish Orientalist clichés about bamboo and water lilies and, instead, boldly take language to their beds, with each woman coercing words to submit to her own power.

The free-verse lyric “Word Slut,” (On 2022h), appearing early in the “Meta” section, epitomizes the bold irreverence and language play that is On’s poetic signature:

I’m so lascivious

I don’t care which ones I go with

roll around with

those short nubby ones

the long elegant ones

the ones from a mongrel mixed race

that fit like marbles in your mouth

(“Word Slut,” On 2022h, 1–7)

Conflating language with sex, the speaker’s provocative diction – that she would roll around with words from a “mongrel mixed race/that fit like marbles in your mouth” – suggest that she intends to provoke some cognitive dissonance of her own through language. Indeed, her ironic retrieval of archaic racial epithets like “mongrel” signal that she is well-aware of her unusual entry into a literary genre (poetry) and a theme (language play) that is typically the domain of British and French fin de siècle men. She may grant Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Pater, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Wilde a presence in Decadence – yet only as figures for contrast, not for imitation, reinvention, nor worship. Lyrics such as “L’esprit de l’escalier” (On 2022f) where the speaker’s misguided desire to imitate “Wildean whimsy” (“L’esprit de l’escalier,” On 2022f, 4) ends in failure, suggest that although Decadence indulges in the sensorial excesses of language, it does so from different contexts and for different aims than its fin de siècle predecessors.

In “Get Lit,” for instance, the speaker knocks some of the most canonical characters in English literature – from Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff to Wilde’s Dorian Gray – from their pedestals by breezily dismissing their novelistic predicaments. Later, the speaker addresses Wilde directly in “Apocalypse in the Car Park,” (“Listen here Oscar / we may all be in the gutter / but some of us can’t look at the stars [...] / so shut your upbeat mouth,” On 2022b, 1–8) with such irreverence that she steals the crown of flamboyance from the queer Irish icon himself, positioning him as a bland mouthpiece rather than a radical. As the speaker later explains, stargazing is out of the question when “precarity [is her] only sustenance” (“Apocalypse in the Car Park,” On 2022b, 11), thus tacitly underlining the class and race privileges shaping the life and legacy of figures as Wilde and his contemporaries.^[5]

Taking the fin de siècle down a few pegs in the “Meta” section allows the rest of Decadence to focus on language play and its relationship to eroticism. If language is sex, then sex is also a language, and the poems in the “Physical” section repeatedly explore this doubled connection from different angles. “Ripe,” an eight-line impressionist lyric that opens the section, offers a suggestive image of the feijoa, a fruit found in South America’s southern cone and in New Zealand:

Now when you eat a feijoa

lightly perfumed

creamy flesh

you’ll think of me

the first time

collected from the lane

a stray in the dark

dropped sweet.

(“Ripe,” On 2022g)

The impressionistic gestures dissolve the boundaries between the feijoa’s aromatic flesh and the speaker’s own body, exemplifying how a poet can draw sensual associations between Asian women and objects in ways that do not depend on their degradation or tokenization. It is tempting to retrieve realism as an answer to the duress that Asian women have experienced in the western imaginary, yet On resists that easy turn by offering a poem that centers the Asian object-woman as the locus of a treasured memory – one where the woman coyly holds the upper hand since she leaves an indelible mark on her lover (“Now when you eat a feijoa […] / you’ll think of me”).

The poetic conflation between language and sex later acquires one of its most playful manifestations in the poem “Decadence,” where carefully placed punctuation marks – ranging from commas to dashes to the semicircles of parenthesis – shape the poem’s visual appearance and rhythmic pace in ways that echo the copulative acts that the poem describes. These gestures, however, do not exist only to tease the reader for teasing’s sake. The speaker in “Bird-boned” puts it best when driving away from her one-night stand (On 2022d):

tonight I will sleep with the film of sweat

hair matted and skin tender

scrawled over with your invisible signature

warm from the exchanges of breath

& the motion of bodies through space

tonight the world feels a little less cruel

(“Bird-Boned,” On 2022d, 6–11)

Ellis Hanson has stressed how decadent eroticism with respect to “the upper-class, overly educated, impeccably dressed aesthete, a man whose masculinity is confounded by his tendency to androgyny, homosexuality, masochism, mysticism, or neurosis” (1997], p. 3) involves an addiction to one’s own longing without fulfilment, “his desire to desire without respite” (1997], p. 4). Yet when the women in Decadence pursue desire, they find repeated fulfilment – a longing satiated, reignited, and satiated again. This is no small matter given the dynamics of ornamentalism, Orientalism, and the model minority myth that are continually yoked to East Asian femininity, all of which make the central question of desire different for them than their fin de siecle male predecessors.

What is indulgent for the speaker in “Bird-boned” is a night that goes well in contrast to the various violences waiting for her outside of the bedroom. The sumptuous rarity of being held and beheld in exactly the way one wants to (the word “tonight” begins the first lines of all three verses, stressing this night’s singularity); permitting pleasure without the pressure of maintaining perfection (“hair matted and skin tender”); submitting to desire without fear that such submission will be instrumentalized against you (“scrawled over with your invisible signature”) – no wonder the speaker of “Bird-boned” concludes that “tonight the world feels a little less cruel.” In the same way Marriott argued that “Black Lives Matter” is a decadent luxury in the face of global anti-Blackness, the speaker’s desirous body alone and what she does with it in “Bird-boned” is such a luxury in the face of the exoticization, tokenization, and model minority perfectionism that was dramatized in “Hyphenated” that it metaphorically bejewels her, making her “as quietly radiant as the necklace of light/on the West Gate Bridge above” (“Bird-Boned,” On 2022d, 4–5).

The poems in the “Physical” section are also remarkable for what they do not say. References to the racial and cultural backgrounds of the poem’s speakers are felt, but rarely mentioned in Decadence overall: their backgrounds are instead implied by way of momentary, but important, revelations about Vietnam and Asia in poems such as “Hyphenated” and another lushly written prose-poem, “Melbourne in Concert.” Otherwise, the rest of Decadence withholds an overdetermined focus on racial and cultural categories. The gesture is less a race-blind act than it is a refusal to fall into tokenization’s traps, for it allows On’s speakers to flaunt their way through language and life without the obligation of becoming mascots for racial justice. This, too, is part of what it means for a “hothouse orchid with no outside breeze” to find fresh air.

The playful poetic field of Decadence is stressed in the last two poems in the final section, “Space.” In a feminist nod to Virginia Woolf, the speaker of the 14 unrhymed couplets of “A Room of One’s Own” revels in the absence of others: there is finally “room / for an indulgence stretched / wider for being alone [...] / I can trace with a finger / sky writing my name” (“A Room of One’s Own,” On 2022a, 4–14). The anonymous European crowd so beloved by nineteenth-century British and French flâneurs could never behold her correctly. Only in the wide orb of solitude does her identity and what it signifies remain truly her own to write, shape, and define. This is why the speaker in the last poem, “Art for Art’s Sake,” reminds the reader that the poems in Decadence are “paper cuts / outside of tradition / Pater and Wilde and Swinburne” (“Art for Art’s Sake,” On 2022c, 1–3). She affirms that “all art is quite useless,” (“Art for Art’s Sake,” On 2022c, 16; original emphasis), but delinks from the way that this belief then became the justification for fin de siècle men to indulge in their disregard for others, positioning it instead as a place for the hothouse orchid, who has been suffocated and hyphenated by the western gaze for so long, to flourish – a life “to be lived beautifully/a flower that unfurls for itself” (“Art for Art’s Sake,” On 2022c, 94). Decadence offers a new metaphysical space where the woman is no longer condemned as a flower of evil – as the mixed-race Haitian Jeanne Duval was in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal/The Flowers of Evil (1857) – but understood as a flower unfurling on her own terms.

5 Conclusions

LOTE and Decadence suggest that the global turn in decadence studies must acknowledge how the terms that constituted aesthetic excess for the British and French male poets of the decadent fin de siècle are not necessarily the only, nor the most important, terms for understanding aesthetic excess globally today. What excess looks like and what it signifies will shift depending on who is writing about it and at what scale. As the field responds to the call to undiscipline Eurocentric and phallocentric understandings about the nineteenth century and its imperial afterlives,^[6] a central test that decadence studies faces is whether it will grant the same degree of attention, curiosity, and legitimacy that it gives to writers such as Huysmans and Wilde to writers such as von Reinhold and On.