Department of Comparative Literature Open Forum - Xavier Lee

Comparative Literature Open Forum with Xavier Lee, PhD Candidate, presents, “Vies de boys.”

In this paper, I theorize the boy as a figure of racial gender within the context of colonial and postcolonial Francophone Africa. Through a reading of Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (1956) and Sembène Ousmane’s La Noire de… (1966), I consider the tragic elements of the boy within the French colonial imaginary. I am primarily motivated by how the boy is made to symbolize colonial domesticity at the detriment to indigenous logics of selfhood and gender performance. In doing so, I draw on theories of the psychoanalysis of race and the colonialities of power and gender and sociohistorical studies of black houseboys, housegirls and domestic servants in the colonial worlds of Africa and Asia.