TY  - JOUR
AU  - Nuraan Davids
PY  - 2024
CY  - Berlin, Germany
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
JF  - PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION
IS  - 3
VL  - 5
SN  - 2578-5761
TI  - Decolonisation and the Risks of Exception in South African Higher Education
DO  - 10.3726/PTIHE.032023.0491
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1457300
N2  - Amid competing arguments of what it “looks like” and what it “should be doing”, decolonisation in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa has become increasingly problematised and stultified. On the one hand, a coalescence between decolonisation and Africanisation has taken root in a propagation of decolonisation-as-Blackness and, hence, by implication, anti-whiteness. On the other hand, there is a worrying resort to structural and epistemic violence, which has come to characterise student protests. I argue that decolonisation can neither erase colonialism through a language of exception nor through a language of violence. Decolonisation calls for an epistemic re-prioritisation and restoration of what makes us all human. This means that until students (and others) liberate themselves from a discourse of dichotomous binaries (as found in constructions of Blackness/whiteness), and until they unlearn the violence of colonialism, decolonisation will not evolve in South Africa.
KW  - decolonisation, South Africa, higher education, “Blackness”, violence; exception
ER  -