To the absent reader, to those who are going to arrive: On translation, radical indiscipline and epistemological care

Giulia Palladini

doi:10.21476/PP.2022.71310

Authors

Giulia Palladini University of Roehampton

Keywords:

knowledge production, decolonization, difference

Abstract

The essay engages in conversation with the work of Pedro Lemebel, and attempts to articulate through its close reading a reflection on the stakes of epistemological care, language, and translation in contemporary globalised academia. This reflection is organized as a response to a series of texts, and stages a conversation between them: Pedro Lemebel’s Canción para un niño boliviano que nunca vio la mar (2004), the letter “White Colleagues Listen! An open letter to UK Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies” by the Network Revolution or Nothing (2020), Pedro Lemebel’s manifesto Hablo por mi diferencia (1986). Engaging in particular with the idea of “aesthetic education” advanced by Gayatri Spivak and with the reflections on language and decolonization articulated by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the essay meditates on the political capacity that teachers and scholars, working in globalised neoliberal academia, can build together to attend to the urgent task of vigorously questioning the system of epistemological thinking that make possible the identification of any marker of difference.

Author Biography

Giulia Palladini, University of Roehampton

Giulia Palladini is a researcher and critical theorist, currently working as Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton. In her work she engages the politics and erotics of artistic production, as well as social and cultural history from a Marxist and feminist perspective. Her most recent work explores social reproduction, political imagination and the idea of militant abundance. She has worked as a theorist and dramaturg in a number of critical and artistic projects both in Europe and Latin America. She is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (2017) and of Lexicon for an Affective Archive (2017, co-edited with Marco Pustianaz).

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