Xi “Títílayọ̀” Jin is a Ph.D. candidate in African Cultural Studies, with a minor in Visual Cultures, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. She holds a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Normal University and an M.A. in African Literature and Cultural Studies from Peking University. Centering on restitution, her research examines the political and spiritual afterlives of African cultural objects in global contexts, bridging African literature and cinema with museum studies, decolonial thought, and Afro-Asian exchange.
Her article, “An Eastern Gaze: Reconsidering ‘African Art’ from a Chinese Perspective,” appears in Entangled Histories and Ambivalent Feelings: China–Africa Encounters in Culture and Media (Routledge, 2025). She has received multiple awards from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, including the Aliko Songolo Summer Research Award (2024), the Ebrahim Hussein Fellowship (2024), and a nomination for the MAGS/ProQuest Master’s Thesis Award (2023).
As the inaugural fellow of the Restitution and Reparation: Africa and the Post-Colonial Condition fellowship, hosted in Fall 2025 at The Africa Institute, Xi Jin advances her dissertation by theorizing visual, sonic, and narrative forms of return in a chapter-based article, while refining key conceptual tools such as “misrecognized mediator” and “encountered affinity.”
