Members of Reading Decoloniality collaborate on special issues for world-leading journals. This page features current calls for papers.
Special Issue for Postcolonial Studies
40 Years of Decolonising the Mind
Editorial team
Dr Xolisa Guzula (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Dr Claire French (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Dr Giulia Champion (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)
Scheduled for
Volume 29, Issue 4 (Dec. 2026)
Introduction to the call
Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) was foundational in its call to Indigenous African literary, artistic and cultural (re)production. Ngũgĩ challenged the neutrality of language to advance studies on discourse, power and coloniality, not just for applied and sociolinguistics and biliteracy scholars, but for those across the humanities and social sciences exploring community-led arts, oral traditions and Black aesthetics. In announcing Decolonising the Mind as his final work in English, and a new commitment to his languages, Gikuyu and Kiswahili, African language writing became a practice of activism and a reminder of linguistic possibilities for publishing.
Forty years on, this special issue revisits Decolonising the Mind as a living provocation that penetrates the English-dominant globalising and decolonising world. We invite contributions (4,500 words, incl. references) that explore and critique practices of mother-tongue advocacy across literary, artistic and cultural (re)productions. The framing of practices is purposefully wide to invite experimentations with form that respond to new cultural canonisation or the hierarchisation that enters through it.
Submissions should be in English and accompanied by a translation into another language of the author’s choice, in the spirit of Ngũgĩ’s multilingual praxis.
Language practices
Although language rights are at the heart of Ngũgĩ’s text, we are interested in authors going further to investigate theoretical, methodological and analytical contributions that situate these debates within their ideological inheritances. Discourses of linguistic citizenship (Stroud 2018), linguistic sustainability (Bastardas-Boada 2014), third spaces (Guzula, Tyler & McKinney 2016) and Ubuntu translanguaging (Makalela 2016) are examples of paradigms critically engaging with a historical reliance on justice, agency and rights. We are looking for a critical examination of the complexity of multilingualism in relation to variables in flux and how they impact living and non-living things.
Community-led artistic practices
Ngũgĩ’s emphasis on artistic spaces for education and political mobilisation shifted ethical and aesthetic parameters for how socially engaged performance demands responses to locatedness and form. We encourage critical insights from discourses that further ethical, performative and participatory frameworks for community performance, including voice/voicing in applied and socially engaged performance (Nicholson and Hughes 2016; Weston 2025; Afolabi and Holmes 2025), diaspora, orality and cosmologies (Taiwo 2021), voice and standardisation in performance training (McAllister-Viel 2019), multilingual methodologies and dramaturgies (French 2020; Lech 2024); decolonising and decentring practices (Bala 2017; Arora 2021; Ravengai 2024), postmigrant theatre (Meerzon and Pewny 2019; Sharifi 2018), as well as contemporary articulations of intracultural performance (Bharucha 1993) and Black aesthetics (Ukala 1996).
Critical Indigenous Studies
Ngũgĩ’s focus on the devaluation of Indigenous languages is central to thinking with First Nation and Indigenous contexts. First Nation and Indigenous groups have been brought to the brink of physical and intellectual annihilation through colonial genocidal violence, segregation and Apartheid practices, forced silencing and past and contemporary settler land dispossession (Shizha 2010; Bhargava 2013; Kimmerer 2013; Coulthard 2014; ka Canham 2023; Pervez 2025). We invite scholars exploring how epistemicide is a compound and continued violence of colonial practices seeping through our current structural and systemic inequalities, and those investigating how language and culture regeneration and preservation can sustain memory and resistance work, particularly in the context of challenging Indigenous Knowledges as ‘other’ to sciences, policy, etc. (Simpson 2017; Chilisa 2017; Yunkaporta 2019, Lowan-Trudeau 2021, Hernández 2022, Champion and Strand 2025).
Environmental Humanities practices
Crucially, we welcome work that expands Ngũgĩ’s insights into environmental, oceanic, and planetary concerns. Discourses across the environmental humanities may inform how place, practices, and memory are in connection with sustainable relationships to land and water, or offer tools to resist and challenge colonial extractive practices, from imperial endeavours to modern-day hydrocarbon and mineral extractivism and climate coloniality. (Srinivasan 2017; Whyte 2018; Ferdinand 2019; Vergès 2019; Gumbs 2020; Wright 2021; Liboiron 2021; Wright 2021; Sultana 2022; Lobo and Parsons 2023).
Other themes may include:
- Translanguaging practices and pedagogical translanguaging/languaging-for-learning as resistance to linguistic and cultural essentialism;
- Practices of linguistic sustainability;
- Mother tongue resistance to language coloniality in education, policy and science;
- Multilingual practice-as-research/performance/media exploring the body;
- Biliteracy practices and education responding to linguistic minoritisation;
- Creative practices responding to linguistic minoritisation;
- Language of policy, law-making, science, etc. as narrative;
- Epistemic injustices of international governance language;
- Translation as a mode of environmental and epistemic care;
- Language and water (including fresh water)- and land-based cosmologies;
- Indigenous language advocacy as an ecological and cultural practice;
- Englishes and challenges to globalising language hierarchies.
Submission instructions
We welcome research articles (max 4,500 inc. references) as academic and hybrid explorations with creative-critical dimensions. All submissions will be reviewed by two anonymous referees and by the editors. After a successful peer review, you will submit the article in another language of your choice. Please submit 300-word abstracts and 100-word biographies to the Editorial Team by 15th December 2025: xolisa.guzula@uct.ac.za, clairefrench@cc.au.dk and g.champion@soton.ac.uk.
View this call on the publisher’s website
Key dates
Abstract deadline: 15 December 2025
Notification of acceptance: 26 January 2026
Full article deadline: 6 April 2026
Peer review feedback and revisions: August-October 2026
Publication: December 2026
Editorial biographies
Dr Xolisa Guzula is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Language and Literacy Studies with a focus on multilingual and multiliteracies education at the University of Cape Town. She specialises in multilingual education, especially in teaching children to speak, read and write in two or more languages. She is one of the founders of a network of reading clubs growing across the country, starting from the Vulindlela Reading Clubs to Nal’ibali Reading Clubs and the Stars of Today Literacy Club. She has written several children’s books including the recent series of Imbokodo: Women who shape us and has translated many children’s books from English to isiXhosa including books by award winning authors such as Astrid Lindgren’s Brothers Lionheart, Niky Daly’s, Sihle-isipho Nontshokweni, Refiloe Moahloli and Nicholas Maritz’books. She won an IBBY/Exclusive Books award for best translation of The Elders at the Door by Shale and Maryanne Bester to Iinkonde eMnyango in 2020 and in 2024 she won the same award for her quality translation of Nonikiwe Mashologu’s book Sing Nala to Cula Nala in isiXhosa. Xolisa’s translation of Wendy Hardie’s book, The Singing Stone/Ilitye Eliculayo has made the honour list of IBBY 100 recommended books across the world. Recently, she has released her translation of Sello Duiker’s book titled, ‘The Hidden Star’ into ‘Inkwenkwezi efihlakeleyo’. Xolisa is a member of Bua-lit Language and Literacy Collective (www.bua-lit.org.za), working on social justice in language and literacy education. She is also the Chair of the Western Cape Committee of the Literacy Association of South Africa (LITASA).
Dr Claire French is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow in dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark, and was previously Assistant Professor of Performance and Creative Practices at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research investigates the ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies of multilingual dramaturgies within socially engaged and ensemble traditions. With a methods-driven approach, she draws on sociolinguistics, decolonial theory, and performance studies to develop analytical strategies for identifying and rethinking how the body reproduces language ideologies. French’s work spans a wide range of making practices, including performance training, community facilitation, ensemble devising, and playwriting. Her artistic practice deepens her inquiry through roles as facilitator, dramaturg, and playwright, with recent plays including Courage Songs (2024) and The tongue / Die tong (2025) with Mercy Kannemeyer. She is particularly focused on the geo-political consequences of storytelling that misrepresents the global majority, using multilingualism as a means to expand and enrich knowledge production.
Dr Giulia Champion (University of Southampton) is a Research Fellow exploring questions of social and epistemic in/justice, seabed governance and activism and international (cultural) policy in relation to the deep ocean beyond national jurisdiction. Her main research project, entitled (Un)Mediating the Ocean: Making the Seabed in Governance, Science, Finance, Culture and Infrastructure, investigates how the seabed is mediated in legal, financial, scientific, infrastructural and cultural documents and interventions as part of the creation of a regulatory framework for deep-sea mining at the International Seabed Authority (ISA). The project explores questions about just energy transition, fair and inclusive civil society engagement with the ISA negotiations and in/tangible underwater cultural heritage.
References:
Afolabi, T. and Holmes, S. 2025. Exploring the notion of voice and the ethics of voicing in applied performance: Reflections’, in Applied Theatre: Voice: Performance and Social Justice. London: Methuen Drama, pp. 75–94. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350371422
Arora, S. 2021. A Manifesto to Decentre Theatre and Performance Studies.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 41 (1), 12–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1881730
Bala, S. 2017. Decolonising Theatre and Performance Studies: Tales from the classroom.
Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 20 (3), 333-345. https://doi.org/10.5117/TVGN2017.3.BALA
Bastardas-Boada, A., 2014. Linguistic Sustainability for a Multilingual Humanity. Sustainable Multilingualism / Darnioji Daugiakalbystė 5, 134–163. https://doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.5.5
Bhargava, R., 2013. Overcoming the epistemic injustice of colonialism. Global Policy 4, 413–417. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1758‐5899.12093
Bharucha, R., 1993. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. Routledge, London.
Champion, G., Strand, M., 2025. “Other(ed)” ocean knowledges: unlearning integration in ocean governance for recognitional justice. Ocean and Society 2: Knowledge Integration in Ocean Governance, 8875. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/oas.8875
Chilisa, B., 2017. Decolonising transdisciplinary research approaches: An African perspective for enhancing knowledge integration in sustainability science. Sustainability Science 12, 813–827.
Coulthard, G.S., 2014. Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.
Ferdinand, M., 2019. Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Seuil, Paris.
French, C., 2021. Facilitating departures from monolingual discourses. Applied Theatre Research 9, 7–23. https://doi.org/10.1386/atr_00045_1
Gumbs, A.P., 2020. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. AK Press, Chico.
Guzula, X., McKinney, C., Tyler, R., 2016. Languaging-for-learning: Legitimising translanguaging and enabling multimodal practices in third spaces. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 34, 211. https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2016.1250360
Hernandez, J., 2022. Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science. North Atlantic Books, Huichin, unceded Ohlone land aka Berkeley, California.
Hughes, J. and Nicholson, H. (Eds) 2016. Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ka Canham, H., 2023. Riotous Deathscapes. Duke University Press, Durham.
Kimmerer, R.W., 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.
Lech, K., 2024. Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre, New Dramaturgies. Springer International Publishing, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40624-9
Liboiron, M., 2021. Pollution is Colonialism. Duke University Press.
Lobo, M., Parsons, M., 2023. Decolonizing ocean spaces: Saltwater co-belonging and responsibilities. Progress in Environmental Geography 2, 128–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/27539687231179231
Lowan-Trudeau, G., n.d. Mapping (as) Resistance: Decolonizing↔Indigenizing Journalistic Cartography. Media+Environment 3.
Makalela, L., 2016. Ubuntu translanguaging: An alternative framework for complex multilingual encounters. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 34, 187–196. https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2016.1250350
McAllister-Viel, T. 2019. Training Actors’ Voices: Towards an Intercultural/Interdisciplinary Approach. Abingdon: Routledge.
Meerzon, Y. & Pewny, K. (Eds.). 2019. Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351270267
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1992. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. East African Publishers, Nairobi.
Pervez, A., 2025. Witnessing silence: the Palestinian genocide, institutional complicity, and the politics of knowledge. Globalisation, Societies and Education 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2025.2513637
Ravengai, S., 2024. Decolonising African Theatre, Elements in Theatre, Performance and the Political. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Sharifi, A. 2018. Multilingualism and Postmigrant Theatre in Germany, Modern Drama, [online]. Available at: https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/md.s0915
Shizha, E., 2010. Rethinking and Reconstituting Indigenous Knowledge and Voices in the Academy in Zimbabwe: A Decolonization Process, in: Kapoor, D., Shizha, E. (Eds.), Indigenous Knowledge and Learning in Asia/Pacific and Africa: Perspectives on Development, Education, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 115–129.
Srinivasan, R., 2017. Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World. New York University Press, New York.
Stroud, C., 2018. Linguistic Citizenship, in: Lim, L., Stroud, C., Wee, L. (Eds.), The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change. Multilingual Matters, Bristol and Blue Ridge Summit, pp. 17–39.
Sultana, F., 2022. The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography 99, 102638.
Taiwo, O. 2021. The Return Beat: Interfacing with Our Interface. Oxford / Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / New York / Wien: Peter Lang.
Ukala, S., 1996. ‘Folkism’: Towards a National Aesthetic Principle for Nigerian Dramaturgy. New Theatre Quarterly 12, 279–287. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00010277
Vergès, F., 2019. Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender. e-flux journal 100, 1–13.
Weston, S. (Ed.) .2025. Applied Theatre: Voice: Performance and Social Justice. London: Methuen Drama.
Whyte, K.P., 2018. Settler colonialism, ecology, and environmental injustice. Environment and Society 9, 125–144.
Wright, W.J., 2021. As Above, So Below: Anti-Black Violence as Environmental Racism. Antipode 53.
Yunkaporta, T., 2019. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Text Publishing, Melbourne.