Breaking textual and gender barriers

In 2021, Capovolte published the Italian translation of Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism (2008) by Portuguese writer Grada Kilomba. In the text, the author explores the enduring effects of colonialism that still define individual and collective trauma of Black people, and reconfigures English as a new empowering mode of expression. The linguistic issue is deeply rooted in the postcolonial discourse at the centre of Kilomba’s writing, and it is further developed in the paratext to the Italian translation. The Capovolte edition introduces the schwa (ə), embodying one of the ways in which language barriers are overcome to transcend cultural and societal constraints, and translation itself becomes an act of empowerment and resistance against the linguistic and conceptual barriers imposed by (gendered) language ( Santaemilia, 2005 ; von Flotow and Kamal, 2020 ). Drawing primarily on Kathryn Batchelor’s (2018) framework, this paper examines different peritexts (notes prefixed to the physical book) and epitexts (the publishing house website with links to interviews to the author and one of the Italian translators) to Memorie della piantagione . In particular, the digital epitextual elements “break” the barrier of the text, turning it into a dynamic space that combines several representational modes and, thus, requires a multimodal approach to be thoroughly decoded and analysed ( Jewitt, 2009 ; Moschini and Sindoni, 2022 Pauwels, 2012 ). It is only by considering the translated text and its multimodal paratext together that it is possible to assess how the Italian translation breaks gender barriers and participates in a larger discussion on language, translation and postcolonial resistance.