Who are these bodies for? Translating Naked cultures, languages and bodies of African American women

The essay stems from the reading of "Naked. Black Women Bre All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips and Other Parts," an anthology of twenty-five short stories written by contemporary African American women writers, edited by Ayana Byrd and Akira Solomon. The coice was motivated by two main reasons: an unconventional linguistic code and a multifaceted thematic structure. Their narrative process shapes a powerful intergenerational dialogue deconstructing the conventional images that aim to catch African American women between racism and sexism. The language of these writers is linked to the African American English tradition with its peculiar semantic and syntactic structures, but also to a lexical specificity regarding race words and expressions, sexist/gender slurs and references to objects, personalities and products belonging to the American (mass) culture. The language is analyzed from the perspective of a translator, aware of the extreme importance of preserving the message engraved in the language in order to convey the original message to the target audience of a translated text.