bell hooks: sconfinare e sovvertire

Drawing on her experience as translator and editor of the Italian collections of bell hooks’s books and essays, the author comments on her greatest difficulty in translating hooks’ works – finding an Italian publishing house interested in them. The essay briefly traces the story of the Italian translations of hooks’ books, highlighting how the first translations gained some popularity when they appeared in the late nineties. They were then forgotten to be rediscovered after the recent publication of the Italian version of Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. While retracing the fortunes of hooks’s work and highlighting its subversive potential, the essay provides an outline of the intellectual’s intersectional feminism, focusing on her perspective on and understanding of the reappropriation of the English language by the enslaved, the oppressed, and the marginalized.