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Best Translation of a Literary Work Published in 2025 from the American Association of Italian Studies

In her memoir, Anna Maria Gehnyei, better known as singer, rapper, and producer Karima 2G, reveals the challenges she faced as the child of Liberian immigrants, born and raised in Rome but perpetually viewed by her fellow Italians as a foreigner.
 
The daughter of the first Kpelle man to ever leave his native village and emigrate to Europe, Anna is proud of her heritage but only knows Liberia as a mystical, faraway land that appears in her parents’ stories. Though Italy is the only homeland she knows, she is merely classed as a resident, not a permanent citizen. At school and in the streets of Rome, she is treated to a mixture of patronizing condescension and xenophobic hostility. But Anna refuses to be bullied into mute submission, finding her voice as a performer and activist who demands recognition for Italy’s growing immigrant population.
 

How Black women’s reproduction became integral to white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy—and remains key to their dismantling

In the United States, slavery relied on the reproduction and other labors of unfree Black women. Nearly four centuries later, Black reproductivity remains a vital technology for the creation, negotiation, and transformation of sexualized and gendered racial categories. Yet even as Black reproduction has been deployed to resolve the conflicting demands of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that it also holds the potential to destabilize the oppressive systems it is supposed to maintain.

The Black Reproductive convenes Black literary and cultural studies with feminist and queer theory to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and images alongside their pre-emancipation counterparts. These provocative, unexpected couplings include how Toni Morrison’s depiction of infanticide regenders Orlando Patterson’s theory of social death, and how Mary Prince’s eighteenth-century fugitive slave narrative is resignified through the representational paradoxes of Gayl Jones’s blues novel Corregidora. Throughout, Kaplan offers new perspectives on Black motherhood and gendered labor, from debates over the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, to the demise of racist icon Aunt Jemima, to discussions of Black reproductive freedom and abortion. 

The Black Reproductive gives vital insight into the historic and ongoing conditions of Black unfreedom, and points to the possibilities for a Black feminist practice of individual and collective freedom.

The Gloria Wekker Reader compiles articles, essays, interviews, poems, and letters by the Afro-Surinamese Dutch theorist and activist, Gloria Wekker. Wekker is a preeminent scholar in feminist Black diaspora studies, especially known for her developments in epistemology and methodology, conceptualizations of sexuality, and mapping of the connections between race, gender, and empire. These writings demonstrate Wekker’s theoretical and political prowess, illuminating how her scholarship was foundational in shifting the fields of anthropology, feminist and queer studies, and Black diasporic studies. Featuring a foreword by Angela Y. Davis, engaging with The Gloria Wekker Reader is an invitation for interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue to inspire political action.

To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.
 

In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, drag performance is now a state-sponsored event. Transformismo suggests that these performances make critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba’s postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Leslie Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island’s tourism economy and has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Leslie Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women’s creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital.