In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

The invitation poem, in which the beloved is urged to come away to an idealized place, is among the most enduring genres of European love poetry. The tradition begins with the biblical Song of Songs, which sets several important precedents: a dialogic framework, a close association of lover and landscape, and a sense of love as exile. Medieval and Renaissance invitation poems follow the Song of Songs but shift its emphases toward monologue, materialism, and importunity. Milton thus inherits a dual tradition of invitational poetry, both aspects of which figure prominently in Paradise Lost. Recognizing the traditional features of the genre therefore illuminates significant moments in the epic, including, notably, Eve's final speech. The invitational tropes in this passage reveal how Eve reconceives of exile as homecoming and how she reestablishes a sense of radical mutuality with Adam by completing a dialogue that began before the Fall.

On 14 october 1492, on the island that he had just named San Salvador, Christopher Columbus Seized Seven TaÍno indians to serve as translators. The abduction was clearly an act of significant forethought, registering Columbus's intention that these interpreters “inquire and inform … about things in these parts” (Columbus, “Tetter” 118)—a first step toward the subjugation of all the inhabitants of San Salvador, who might one day be “taken to Castile or held captive” on the island (Columbus, Diario 75). The taking of these indigenous translators has been no less momentous for contemporary scholarship, perhaps especially in early modern English and American literary studies: in the year of the Columbian quincentenary, Stephen Greenblatt memorably called it “the primal crime in the New World … committed in the interest of language” (24); Eric Cheyfitz concurs that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (104). Yet the concept of translation as a wholly imperial instrument, as commonplace in Columbus's day as in our own, has limited our thinking in important ways (Adorno, “Polemics” 20). As ethnohistorians and literary critics alike have suggested, the interpretive sway of the “linguistic colonialism” model can obscure as much about its Native objects as it reveals about the purported discursive complexity of its European subjects.

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.

Is there a new “religious turn” in early american studies? or do declensions and revivals in scholarly attention to Religious matters suggest something about how religion and spirituality are lived? Witness an episode from the life of Olaudah Equiano, as recorded in his Interesting Narrative (1789), one of the new classics of early American literary study. It is October 1773, and the twenty-eight-year-old Equiano finds himself once again home in London. London, of course, is home in name only. Where is home for Equiano, really? Is it Igbo West Africa, the Carolinas, Philadelphia, London, or the black Atlantic itself? Did Equiano himself even know?

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.

A strange impatience characterizes recent debates surrounding not only comparative literature but also related fields such as recognition, ethics, postcolonialism, and cultural studies: the impatience with notions like alterity, difference, and the other. These notions have enjoyed an unprecedented (and presumably undue) amount of attention for roughly thirty-five years, but now many commentators are eager to lay to rest their spectral presence or to shoo them away like a bothersome insect. Among the most recent and resolute attempts to overcome the “excesses” of the turn toward the other is arguably the oeuvre of Jacques Rancière, who forges an analogy between the cynical foreign policy of the Bush government, including its “war on terror,” and an ethics of otherness—an ethics usually based on concepts of the sublime and linked by Rancière to the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Giorgio Agamben (Dissensus). Rancière repeatedly insists that what is often called the absolutization of the other can lead to, or at least feed into, political forms of “othering” that threaten to achieve the opposite of what they were designed to do. However, any such attempt to end the interlude of otherness—and to return to a concept of universalism or the human, however modified—means to return to sameness.

In 1776 the russian merchant grigor ivanovich shelikhov outfitted a ship bound from the siberian peninsula of kamchatka to the Aleutian Islands, which dot the sea at the westernmost reach of the North American continent. The expedition would hunt sea otters for trade in China, where the pelts fetched a high price. The same year nearly two hundred Spanish colonists arrived at the presidio in Monterey after a six-month journey from present-day southern Arizona. The expedition, led by Juan Bautista de Anza, aimed to populate northern California as part of Spain's efforts to resist encroachment from the north by Russian merchants like Shelikhov. Meanwhile, also in 1776, the explorer James Cook left England for the South Pacific in Britain's continuing attempt to rival France's scientific discoveries and access to potential trade goods in Asia. Throughout the European Atlantic, publications and translations of Cook's final travel narrative circulated details of the profitable trans-Pacific fur trade that until this point had largely been enjoyed by the Russians. Together, the Shelikhov, Anza, and Cook expeditions illustrate inter-European competition for resources and trade in the eighteenth-century Pacific while also suggesting the extraordinary transcultural, intercontinental, and multilingual reach of those encounters—including exchanges between several European nations (such as Russia, Spain, England, France), a variety of indigenous peoples (including Aleuts, Tlingits, Haidas, Ohlones, Tahitians, Hawaiians), and the inhabitants of and visitors to Canton (among them Chinese merchants and laborers, foreign traders from many European nations, and sailors and slaves from the Philippines, India, and other regions of Asia).

Area studies and world literature share a spirit of comparison, despite their distinct historical formations in cold war tactics of knowledge for power and the flurry of globalization theory that accompanied the neoliberal 1990s vision of open market as world stage, and notwithstanding recent critical narratives that cleave area studies' particularized zones of specialized, philologically deep knowledge from world literature's globe-spanning yet difference-erasing ambition. That spirit will not speak in these brief remarks, nor can I promise a report, readable or otherwise, to one disciplinary field (the comparative) from any other field (e.g., area studies). Area studies was always comparative. It emerged alongside a host of comparative methodologies whose slicing spatial divisions (continents, spheres of influences, West/East) and stealth temporal ladders (civilization, modernity, development) later comparatists of the literary-critical persuasion may question but whose gestures we are perhaps condemned to repeat in cutting the globe to new spatio-temporal measures. The task is not to redress historical error in the name of comparison (as if the verbal sense of discipline was intended and comparative literature could complete area studies) but rather to re-cognize comparison, which we are always learning how to do, through the remembrance of area studies' ambitions and omissions.

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?

It's time for a pop quiz. you have ten minutes. (is your heart racing? take a deep breath.)

What major events in American literature and American history took place in and around the following years?

(1) 1789

(2) 1800

(3) 1820

(4) 1830

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.

As she struggles to get her bearings in the subterranean world of wonderland, a disoriented alice finds that the act of fanning herself or eating a cake has become uncanny; instead of refreshing her and lifting her spirits, the items she encounters alternately telescope her body, nearly breaking her neck, and shrink her down toward the point of nonexistence. At least Alice experienced these dizzying changes sequentially; her scholarly successors in comparative literature are not so lucky. We find ourselves caught in the turmoil of a field that is exploding to global proportions even as enrollments shrink to levels not seen for half a century, putting severe downward pressure on faculty size, and no helpful mushroom is at hand to help us achieve a stable comfort level. Our inability to encompass the world by adding a wealth of new hires is a practical problem with theoretical consequences. Traditionally focused on the relations of a few literary “great powers,” our discipline increasingly needs to take into account a much wider range of cultures, and of languages, than ever before. If we wish to respond to the opportunities and the challenges offered to comparatism by globalization, we will need to rethink our relation to the national languages and literatures that have long been the focus of comparative study.