African American Studies Commons^™

Babel Blackness: The Aesth-Ethical Turn In Post-Colonial Translation, Emanuela Maltese

Living in Languages

“How do we make art in an ethical way?” (Marlene NourbeSe Philip) is the leading question lying at the basis of this article, which inspired by the story of the unauthorized Italian translation of Zong! seeks to investigate on the ethics of translation and propose a new turn in translation studies, namely a black aesth-ethical one. The proposal here examined is indeed informed by both aesthetics, and ethics. It presents translation as a practice, that draws on recent debates on black aesthetics, with specific reference to the Afro-optimism (AO) of cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten (2013, 2018, 2019) and …