In the name of “homohistory,” “queer temporality,” and “unhistoricism,” some early modernists have accused queer historicists of promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. These early modernists announce their critique of the “straight temporality” allegedly caused by a framework of teleology as a decisive break from previous methods of queer history. Using the accusation of teleology as an analytic fulcrum, this essay scrutinizes these scholars' assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change. Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept queer, as well as homo and hetero, in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake are not only our emerging understandings of the relations between chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but also some of the fundamental purposes and destinations of queering.

In his tale of the miraculous healing of a mute youth in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (bk. 5, ch. 2), Bede figures language pedagogy as poetic emancipation. The tongue's loosening is an escape from physical disability and a figurative deliverance from the bonds of pagan sin through baptismal gesture. It also signifies liberation from the desolation of being trapped in one's own consciousness, a freeing into communion with other people. Bede uses the figure of a linguistically disabled youth to explore the grammatical underpinnings of all language, spoken or written. While he depicts the sacramental aspects of Latinate language learning, he also makes a startling move, hinting that English, a tongue ideologically and geographically peripheral, can adopt the pedagogies of Latin for its own secular uses. The story is an interpretative capstone to Bede's accounts of Cædmon, Imma, and Gregory I's encounter with English slaves in a Roman marketplace.

This paper explores the strange fascination with smallness that runs through Vergil's Aeneid, focusing on the bee simile in book 1, the poem's inaugural miniaturizing moment. Deviating from the standard paradigms of Vergilian criticism, I suggest we can learn a great deal about smallness in this poem by studying it through the lens of the sublime. My analysis bypasses the proliferation of Romantic sublimes to draw primarily on a model of sublimity derived from Neil Hertz's influential reading of Longinus. Read through the Hertzian sublime, miniaturization in the Aeneid is revealed as a subtle articulation of the poem's running concern with power. The bee simile, I argue, enacts a threefold drama in which hero, author, and reader confront what I call their sublime condition, coming to terms with their implication in immensities beyond their comprehension and control.

Looking at Walt Whitman's Civil War writings—especially his memoir Memoranda during the War and his letters of consolation—this essay argues that Whitman discovered in the war a way to enlarge the vision of sex and sexual possibility he had initiated in the “Calamus” poems of 1860. Taking as a point of departure the babies named Walt that were born after the war to soldiers for whom Whitman had cared, the essay describes the multiplicity of roles the poet inhabits in the war writing (mother, father, nurse, lover, confidant, scribe) and reads his acts of surrogacy as efforts to restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and, in particular, to parenthood. Whitman's project of queer generation, the essay argues, usefully complicates recent scholarship on sex, time, and futurity.

In identifying cinematic qualities—including Eisensteinian montage—in Faulkner's major fiction, scholars have conceived of film as an exclusively visual medium. This essay provides evidence of Faulkner's familiarity with Eisenstein's cinematic praxis by examining the similarities between the novelist's 1934 film treatment of Blaise Cendrars's Sutter's Gold and one that Eisenstein produced in 1930. It then argues that there is a striking continuity between the two treatments in the realm of sound—in particular, the imagining and inscription of film sound. Most surprising is the manner in which Faulkner's sonic experimentalism, clearly influenced by Eisenstein, works its way into the novel on which he was working at the time, Absalom, Absalom!. Informed by screen writing and film-sound technology, Faulkner's high-modernist novel contributes to emerging scholarly interest in the auditory culture of modernism.

How do you say khaki in fourteen languages? assuming that the answer is, in most cases, more or less khaki, what might that word mean? This question occurred to me three years ago as I was sitting in my Minnesota office with a student—a brilliant sophomore economics major from Hanoi—trying to understand a thorny text from Cameroon. The text before us was the Vietnamese translation of Ferdinand Oyono's landmark 1956 francophone anticolonial novel Une vie de boy, which I had been pondering for years. A central figure in the novel, the village's French commandant, was often depicted in “son short kaki” (“his khaki shorts”). Though I don't speak Vietnamese, I could make out enough of its modified Latin alphabet to recognize kaki several times in the 1997 translation. In seeking its Vietnamese meaning, I knew that at least six languages were already in play: kaki came to Oyono's French from English, which got the word in the mid-nineteenth century from Hindi-Urdu (where it means dust-colored), which got it from the Persian (transliterated “khakeh”), meaning dust (“Khaki”). What is more, Oyono's novel purports to be translated from the Ewondo, where kaki certainly meant something too. But in Vietnamese? My instinct was that khaki, at least in Vietnam, would signify what it did in Cameroon: the iconic colonial oppressor's fabric. But when my student, Phuong Vu, saw the word in Vietnamese, she immediately searched for an image on her laptop, then showed me a photo of the great anticolonial leader of Vietnam: the khaki-wearing Ho Chi Minh. Seeking a further data point, I asked my dean, the Somali scholar Ahmed Samatar, what khaki meant in his mother tongue. His reaction, too, was instant: “my grandfather was the first man in our village to wear khaki: it signifies modernity!” Khaki: one word, worldwide. But clearly not a monosignifying word, since it means, at minimum, dust, dust-colored, modernity, colonization, and anticolonial resistance. To paraphrase Langston Hughes, what kind of a translation can you make out of that?

De Huisjongen, The dutch translation of ferdinand oyono's une vie de boy, was published in 1980 by kosmos and released in two cities: Amsterdam, where the publisher had its headquarters, and Antwerp, the site of its Belgian branch. For Flemish (Dutch-speaking Belgian) readers, the Catholic and French colonial environment described in the novel represented a world that in many ways felt familiar. In the once deeply Catholic Flanders, where French used to be the language spoken by the elite and where the memories of the former colony Belgian Congo are still vivid, people could easily identify with Oyono's main character, Toundi.

In the Netherlands, however, the memories of the nation's colonial history are characterized by a predominantly Protestant world-view that primarily evokes images from Southeast Asia. There, in the former Dutch East Indies, it was not the masculine “boy” but the feminine babu who took care of the household. This explains the decision by the then twenty-seven-year-old Dutch translator of Oyono's novel, today's best-selling author Herman Koch, not to use boy in the title but to opt for huisjongen (lit., “house youth”). The idea of having a “boy” as housekeeper clearly sounded strange to this Dutch translator.

In view of the different associations the novel must have evoked among Dutch and Flemish readers, this article presents two separate analyses of the same translation. One reflects a Dutch perspective on De huisjongen and interprets Toundi, a child diarist doomed to die at the hands of oppressors, as an African Anne Frank. The other reads the novel from a Flemish perspective and interprets Toundi as an African variant of Manneken Pis, the roguish street boy from Brussels who derides the authorities.

Translators are Typically invisible, noticed only when they blunder. how might one interpret, then, a book translated by a now very visible Nobel laureate, especially when the underlying text confronts controversial subjects that the laureate's own works avoid? Such is the case of the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010), who in 1981 translated Ferdinand Oyono's 1956 Une vie de boy. In its press release announcing the 1998 Nobel for literature, the Swedish Academy called him a writer “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality” (“Nobel Prize”). It is this ability to communicate what refuses fixed meaning that Walter Benjamin famously restored to the art of translation, endowing it with a philosophical and artistic distinction: “Even when all the surface content can be extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive” (19). “Escrever é traduzir” (“To write is to translate”), Saramago would state years after he gained world visibility thanks to the translations of his works. In both cases, he argues, the objective is to pursue what lies beyond language, but the translator strives to communicate what may have been beyond not only the language of the original but also that of the translation (“Traduzir”). Saramago's translation of Oyono's Une vie de boy, a text that readers of Saramago's oeuvre generally overlook along with his other translations, invites a consideration of how the elusive as an artistic value with broad appeal may relate to the local cultural contingencies informing the translator's language choices.

A rendition by nayif kharma of michael etherton's theatrical adaptation of john reed's english translation, the arabic version of Ferdinand Oyono's novel Une vie de boy is at three removes from the original French. Under the title Al-khādim (“The Servant”), the play appeared in 1982 in the series Min al-masrah al-'ālami (“From World Theater”), published by Kuwait's Ministry of Culture. Since to all effects and purposes Etherton's theatrical adaptation is Kharma's original, it is necessary to begin by describing how the Zambian-born British writer who taught drama at the University of Zambia in the 1960s adapted his source, Reed's Houseboy, before discussing how the play was later Arabized.

To understand ferdinand oyono's 1956 cameroonian novel une vie de boy in its two chinese translations, first Understand that modern Chinese literature begins in translation. This is true with translation understood both narrowly and broadly. The first “modern” work of Chinese literature—that is, the first work of literary fiction published in modern vernacular Chinese—is the 1918 “Diary of a Madman” (), by Lu Xun (1881-1936), its title a reference to Nikolay Gogol's 1835 story, its narrative written in the vein of calls by Liang Qichao (1873-1929) for a “revolution in fiction” ( [“Foreword” and “On the Relationship”]), a revolution inspired by translation and the possibilities for fiction Liang was exposed to through translation. In the early twentieth century, fiction written in Chinese began to be foreignizing or, as James Holmes would put it, “mimetic” of foreign prose, “re-emphasizing, by its strangeness, the strangeness which for the target-language reader is inherent in the semantic message of the original,” fitting “a period when genre concepts are weak, literary norms are being called into question, and the target culture as a whole stands open to outside impulses” (27-28).

Almost anyone who reads ferdinand oyono's une vie de boy (1956) in any language will conclude that the novel focuses on French colonialism. But is it only about colonialism by the French? An analysis of the many German resonances throughout the text—as well as an engagement with the German translation of Une vie de boy—suggests that it is about much more. Oyono's Une vie de boy enables the reader to reflect on Europan colonialism more broadly beyond the role of France. The novel offers a lens onto Germany's colonial history because Cameroon was a former colonial “protectorate” of the German empire. This historical context, therefore, places Une vie de boy in both national and transnational contexts. While my reading addresses possible connections or similarities between French and German colonialism, the publication in German itself adds an important layer to the understanding of Une vie de boy in Germany. In consideration of the political activism of the novel's German publisher, Johann (Hans) Fladung (1898-1982), the publication of Oyono's novel can be read as a criticism of German historiography in the 1950s, which frequently avoided Germany's colonial history, a history that has been linked with the crimes of the Holocaust (Zimmerer).

The publication of ferdinand oyono's anticolonial novel une vie de boy (1956) in three scandinavian-language translations—danish, Swedish, and Nynorsk Norwegian—in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a surge of pan-Nordic interest in African culture and liberation movements. This outward turn was part of a major shift in the construction of national and regional identities in the Nordic region—particularly in Denmark and Sweden. Once minor European kingdoms with modest colonial holdings on several continents (including Africa), these considerably downsized modern nation-states were forced to reposition themselves on the world stage starting in the twentieth century. Africa's anticolonial movements presented an opportunity for the Nordic region to embrace a new global role: that of nations of conscience whose leadership on human rights issues granted them influence and authority far beyond the size of their military, population, gross domestic product, or cultural and linguistic presence in the world. While the importance of this leadership among Western nations—particularly in fighting apartheid—can hardly be disputed, it has, paradoxically, also made it possible for Scandinavians to distance themselves from their own colonial involvement in Africa and to focus instead on the more extensive, visible, and enduring colonial histories of other European nations, mainly France and England.

It is in the context of race and revolution during china's long twentieth century that we can best understand the many implications of Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956) in China, where it was translated into the standard Sinitic script as (“The Life of a Boy Servant”) in 1984.

The cycle that had begun as a national strengthening movement in the 1890s achieved some kind of completion or vindication with the early-twenty-first-century rise of China on the world stage. Chinese sovereignty was not only achieved during this century but flaunted; revolutions were not only won but largely put aside. Throughout this process, racial thinking played a crucial role, but its significance has been largely ignored because of an all-consuming nationalism that justified itself through a discourse of wounding: China was the victim of Western imperialism and the object of racism. Racism was and is supposed to be a problem for other, principally Western nations, with tainted histories of slavery and imperialism—hence the failure to acknowledge that Chinese nationalism actually has a distinct, though shifting, racial character. Chinese racial nationalism, and, for a time, racial internationalism under Mao, was a major undercurrent in China's revolutionary sequence in the long twentieth century: the late Qing reform and the ensuing republican revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty; the communist revolution of 1949, which drove out Western and Japanese imperialism and overthrew the republican government; and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, the end of which started China on the path to postsocialism, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Of the fourteen translations of Ferdinand Oyono's une vie de boy published to date, the Vietnamese translation, Đới Làm bồi, dates last, despite Vietnam and Cameroon's shared past under French colonialism. Nguyễn Như đat, the novel's Vietnamese translator, had anticipated that his version, published in 1997, would not find much of a market. The translator's pessimism was warranted, since the Vietnam of the late 1990s drastically differed from the two Vietnams of 1956, when Oyono's novel was originally published. Partitioned after the 1954 Geneva Accords and fighting against each other in the Second Indochina War, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south were unified at the war's end, in 1975, under a socialist government. But since 1986 Vietnam has been engaged in the capitalist world market, albeit under the banner of socialism. Given this context of market socialism, the Vietnamese translation of Oyono's anticolonial novel seems to have lagged temporally: it was published at a time when literary translations in Vietnam began trending away from anticolonialism and toward, for example, Raymond Carver's minimalism, Haruki Murakami's surreal handling of alienation, and, more recently, Vladimir Nabokov's perversely defamiliarizing style.

Most literary scholars based in the united states think of the postcolonial as a largely first and third world affair, neglecting the vast Second World and the socialist dynamics that shaped the postcolonial world in the decades after World War II. The Soviet Russian translation of Ferdinand Oyono's 1956 literary classic Une vie de boy highlights the sustained and complex interactions between the Soviet world and colonial and postcolonial Africa that have played an important role in the development of postcoloniality.