Tradurre la Storia negata. Le fabulazioni critiche di Saidiya Hartman

This doctoral dissertation investigates translation as an ethical, political, and epistemological practice through an interdisciplinary engagement with postcolonial theory, cultural studies, gender and queer studies, and translation studies. Focusing on the work of African American writer and theorist Saidiya Hartman, the study conceives translation not merely as an interlinguistic transfer, but as a form of critical rewriting that intervenes in dominant historical narratives and challenges the epistemic violence of the archive. Translation is approached as a situated practice of responsibility, capable of rendering visible marginalized, silenced, or erased subjectivities. The first chapter establishes the theoretical framework of the dissertation by examining the relationship between language, alterity, and power. Drawing on post-structuralist and postcolonial thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward W. Said, and Homi K. Bhabha, the chapter conceptualizes translation as an ethical encounter with otherness and as a political gesture that disrupts hegemonic discourses. Translation is framed as a form of cultural mediation that exceeds linguistic equivalence and foregrounds questions of representation and responsibility. The second chapter shifts the focus to the archive and to the limits of historiography, interrogating how colonial and institutional archives produce silence, erasure, and distortion. Through the lens of archival theory and postcolonial critique, the chapter explores experimental historical writing and translation practices that respond to the violence of official records by privileging fragments, gaps, and counter-memories. The third chapter reconstructs the intellectual and biographical context of Saidiya Hartman’s work, tracing the development of her methodological approach and situating her within broader debates on Black studies, diaspora, and critical historiography. Particular attention is devoted to Hartman’s elaboration of critical fabulation as an ethical response to archival absence, combining rigorous historical research with speculative narrative strategies. Chapters four and five offer close readings of Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother, respectively, examining the afterlife of slavery, the representation of Black suffering, and the persistence of racial violence in modernity. The analysis foregrounds tensions between visibility and invisibility, memory and forgetting, and explores how translation participates in negotiating these tensions across linguistic and cultural contexts. The sixth chapter is devoted to Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and offers a close analysis of the original text, focusing on its narrative strategies, theoretical framework, and aesthetic devices. Attention is given to Hartman’s use of critical fabulation, archival materials, visual and sonic elements, and to the ways in which waywardness emerges as a situated epistemology and a form of everyday resistance. The seventh chapter shifts the focus to the Italian translation, Vite ribelli, bellissimi esperimenti, and constitutes the practical and translational core of the dissertation, examining challenges related to racially marked terminology, gendered and non-normative identities, oral and non-standard language, paratextual and archival materials. Translation is discussed as a space of ethical negotiation, in which loss, excess, and historical specificity must be carefully balanced. The concluding chapter reflects on postcolonial literary translation as a practice of (r)existence, emphasizing its capacity to challenge normative epistemologies and to open spaces for alternative historical knowledge. Finally, an appendix dedicated to “Crow Jane Makes a Modest Proposal” points toward possible future developments of the research, exploring the implications of Hartman’s recent satirical and manifesto-like writing for translation studies.