Translating in the Wake

This essay examines the role of African and Afrodiasporic interpreters and translators aboard slave ships during the transatlantic slave trade, exploring how their linguistic mediation constituted sites of knowledge production about freedom and unfreedom. Drawing on historical accounts of black interpreters such as “Bristol” and an unnamed free black woman in Havana, the author interrogates the archival silences surrounding these figures and their epistemic negotiations. Utilizing Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” and Christina Sharpe’s framework of living “in the wake” of slavery, the essay proposes a methodological approach to translating the unrecorded oral exchanges that occurred in ship holds between interpreters and kidnapped Africans. These conversations, absent from official archives dominated by European legal and commercial documents, represent crucial moments of epistemic negotiation about the meaning of freedom and enslavement. The author argues that translation studies must grapple with the impossibility of translating what was never recorded while simultaneously recognizing these lost linguistic encounters as foundational to understanding ongoing struggles for liberation. By proposing “translation as critical fabulation,” the essay challenges conventional notions of source texts and fidelity, suggesting instead a speculative practice that imagines what might have been communicated in languages other than European ones and within discourses beyond European law, Christianity, or capitalism. This approach offers a framework for translating archival silences that honors both historical violence and the possibility of epistemic justice, recognizing that the incomplete project of freedom continues to animate contemporary struggles against racial subjection.