At the very beginning of the “Preface” to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak introduces the reader directly into the tracking of the trajectory of a “certain postcolonial subject [which has] been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant’s position.” Situating her own theoretical practice on the moving base of the vanishing present and recognizing her location within the context of the U.S. academy, Spivak brings to the fore the relevance of the politics of translation in the production of knowledge and in the ongoing foreclosure of the Native Informant. As Sandro Mezzadra and Federico Rahola pointed out as early as in 2003, postcolonial theory started to penetrate the Italian context when at least part of it had already been criticized as yet another “post” in the list of academic definitions functioning as an “apology of the present”; at the same time, the “postcolonial condition” calls for the instruments and the permanent parabasis that Spivak repeatedly invokes through her work. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to consider how Spivak’s reflections on and through the act of translation can be “set to work” in order to analyse the current predicament of postcolonial theory in Italy, to see how the politics of translation have affected the Italian reception of both postcolonial theories coming from the English-speaking world and literary texts coming from the “sheer heterogeneity of the decolonized space” (such as, for instance, Mahasweta Devi’s work).