Articles · Vol. 23 No. 1 (2025): Journal of Higher Education in Africa: Special Issue on Decolonising Knowledge Production in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts · Pages 125-142

Conceptualising Decolonisation

A Reflexive Essay from Portuguese Africa

  • Pamila Gupta
    Pamila Gupta
    Research Professor, Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS), University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.
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Vol. 23 · 2025 No. 1 Journal of Higher Education in Africa: Special Issue on Decolonising Knowledge Production in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts JHEA

Abstract

 

In this article, I first address more general writings on decolonisation as simultaneously an anti-imperialist movement and a human rights emancipatory ideology, before mapping how to go about studying this elusive subject and object. Next, I suggest a series of interventions in this expanding area of scholarship by way of a reflexive practice: I discuss alternative ways to write about decolonisation as both a historical event and an ethnographic moment; attend to the experience of the transfer of state power at the end of colonialism; and focus on decolonisation as involving the mobility of people, ideas and things. Lastly, I provide an overview of what I label ‘textual and visual landscapes of decolonisation’ from the location of Portuguese Africa based on my own research and writing (Gupta 2019), before suggesting the contours of a future critical decolonisation studies.

Keywords

Decolonisation Mozambique Portuguese Africa Goa Postcolonial Studies India southern Africa Ricardo Rangel

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Author Biography

  • Pamila Gupta

    Research Professor, Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS), University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.

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