To the absent reader, to those who are going to arrive

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.