About

The Global Decadence Lab (GDL) supports globally-oriented, innovative, and experimental research, pedagogy, and creative work within and outside of academia about an artistic style and political concept called decadence.

You have likely encountered “decadence” in multiple contexts already. In politics, figures often use the word decadence to slam socioeconomic and cultural practices that they believe are responsible for civilisational decline, decay, and degeneration. In art, decadence often refers to excessive decoration on the page, stage, canvas, or one’s body—think gold and glamor, silk and satin, pattern and porousness, masks and masquerades, velvet and voluptuousness. The contrasting meanings of decadence shape everyday speech today, where “decadent” describes desserts such as chocolate cake: something naughty (oh, the decline of our health!), yet something whose visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory excess is desirable, pleasurable, and (some would argue) necessary to the art of living.

Beyond dessert menus, though, decadence and its wide-ranging meanings were—and continue to be—crucial for artists, academics, scientists, and politicians to construct narratives about human life and debate how life should be lived, and these debates define how societies develop.

The word initially gained popularity in the nineteenth century based on its etymology, de-cadere: “to fall away.” Politicians and scientists back then slammed queer and trans peoples as decadents because they were perceived as threats to civilisational development (and therefore “fallen”), insisting instead that heteronormativity was the only acceptable way to live. Many disagreed, and ironically embraced the term decadent to stress their irreverence. This shaped their artistic self-expression as well; many played with gender identities through fashion or clever manipulations of their writerly voice. One of the most well-known amongst them was Oscar Wilde, who embraced his queerness—and paid a price for it.

The term decadence also gained popularity back then because it was used to frame enslaved and colonised peoples as inferior to the west, a belief that even Wilde upheld. Darwinian theories about evolution and the eugenic sciences positioned the west as the height of civilisational perfection, and Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean as signs of civilisation’s decline. This allowed the west to justify colonialism as a heroic mission for “improving” the human race.

Decadence remains relevant in 2025, the year of the GDL’s hard launch. The debates that shaped the nineteenth century are erupting in refracted forms across our world today—and decadence is at the heart of all of them.

In politics, the global swing toward authoritarianism and white supremacy as well as the resistance to this swing rely on competing narratives about civilisational decline. Some today perceive wokeness—that is, addressing social inequalities due to the histories of enslavement, colonisation, heteronormativity, racial capitalism, and patriarchy—as decadent, since deviating from these structures and taking accountability requires falling away from long-held notions of what constitutes a gender, a race, a religion, a citizen, a fetus, a family, or a nation. Others see denying our responsibility to address our world’s inequalities as decadent because it falls away from basic human respect for equal rights.

Competing narratives about decadence also exist in art and culture, where today’s artists and writers are romanticising what they perceive to be our fall from a simpler (though nonetheless imperially-defined) past, or challenging that past altogether in their poetry, prose, plays, and performances. They are also grappling with what role excessive decoration and pleasure should play in the wake of the theft of these experiences from enslaved and colonised peoples and their descendants due to the west’s instrumentalisation of their bodies and lives since Christopher Columbus’s 1492 “discovery” voyages.

Decadence is also defining discussions in new spheres such as artificial intelligence and climate change. For some, AI’s speed, efficiency, and wide applicability embody the height of human civilisation’s development; for others, the racist, elitist, and gendered biases that shape how AI optimises our world and its presentation of inaccurate information as objective fact signify the decline of critical thinking, which is a cornerstone of a humanities education. Similarly, for some, the inability to prioritise our planet’s environmental conditions over economic profit signify the degeneration of humankind’s responsibility to itself and other forms of life; for others, this degeneracy justifies a regeneration of our civilisations by colonising Mars.

How decadence as an artistic style and political concept has unfolded across all spheres and time periods defines how we see ourselves as well as the socioeconomic, cultural, legal, and political decisions that we make about how we should live. To discuss decadence is therefore to discuss the stakes of living, and I invite you to join this conversation through the lab’s events and projects.

I thank the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, for supporting the GDL’s development since its soft launch in 2023. The ubiquity of decadence means that our activities are not restricted to a single place, culture, or historical time period. The GDL sees the term “global” as referring not only to transnational, cosmopolitan, or postcolonial lines of inquiry, but also one that accounts for the histories of enslavement, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism. We welcome interdisciplinary collaborations with all fields and all languages in addition to English, and collaborations with those outside of academia. All methodologies are welcome, as long as they take a global approach to the subject of decadence.

Last Updated: February 2025

Website Design

This website was built using SquareSpace. Its central visual motif is a photo of Wind Sculpture VII (2016) by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, which is currently displayed in the National Museum for African Art in Washington, DC. The photo is available here, under a Creative Commons license. The sculpture is part of Shonibare’s larger engagement with the entanglement between the beautiful and vibrant patterning of decorative West African fabrics and their commodification by global colonisation, which is best epitomized by his larger and more well-known public installation, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. Like Wind Sculpture VII, the sails in the colonialist ship are made of West African fabrics. Shonibare also engaged with Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, reinventing the novel through a provocative series of self-portraits.