The Africa Institute of Global Studies University is pleased to invite you to attend the first Faculty Seminar Series of Spring 2026, featuring Professor Carli Coetzee, a scholar of African literature and cultural studies. Professor Coetzee will deliver a lecture titled “Africa || Asia as Method”.
Date & Time: Thursday February 12, 2026, 12:30 – 2:30 PM GST
Location: Auditorium, GSU (location map)
The session is free and open to the public.
2025 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of Chen Kuan-Hsing’s influential Asia as Method and the founding of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal. One of the major contributions of these projects is the deliberate multiplication of reference points within Asia, thereby de-emphasising a preoccupation with dominant Euro-American scholarly models. The Africa Institute (GSU) in Sharjah shares many of these intellectual aims as an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the study, research, and documentation of Africa, its people, and its cultures from its location in the Gulf. The presentation explores what these projects and intellectual communities can learn from one another in a process of inter-referencing the scholarly and activist traditions they nurture and publish. In doing so, it contributes to the creation of a densely inter-referential historical trajectory for cultural studies, informed by the multiple geo-locations of scholars thinking and writing about and from the majority world.
Carli Coetzee is a scholar of African literature and cultural studies whose work has made contributions to debates on language, ethics, and the politics of knowledge production about and from Africa. Her research asks how scholarship circulates across unequal geographies of publication and pedagogy, and how practices of editing, translation, and mentorship might resist the colonial hierarchies that structure global academia.
Across her career, Coetzee has insisted that the ethics of reading and writing are inseparable from questions of institutional location and intellectual responsibility. Her monographs Written Under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa (Boydell & Brewer / Wits University Press, 2019), winner of the African Literature Association’s award for Best Scholarly Monograph, and Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (Wits University Press, 2013), exemplify this approach.
Coetzee has also collaborated on editorial and mentoring projects. As long-standing editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and founder of the Journal Work Academy, she has created infrastructures of care that sustain Africa-based researchers, editors, and reviewers. Her collaborations with the Lagos Studies Association, the African Studies Association of Africa, and the University of the Witwatersrand have established an ethos of “journal work” as decolonial praxis, a slow, dialogic, and reparative form of intellectual labour that privileges collectivity over extraction. Coetzee’s current work continues to explore the ethics of writing and editing as a form of resistance to academic acceleration and its market logics.
Elizabeth Olayiwola is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Broadcast, Film, and Multimedia at the University of Abuja, Nigeria and is currently Okwui Enwezor Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture, Performance Studies, and Critical Humanities at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of film, women, and religious studies. Read more.
The seminar will be in English.
The Africa Institute of Global Studies University is pleased to invite you to attend the first Faculty Seminar Series of Spring 2026, featuring Professor Carli Coetzee, a scholar of African literature and cultural studies. Professor Coetzee will deliver a lecture titled “Africa || Asia as Method”.
The Africa Institute of Global Studies University is pleased to invite you to attend the first Faculty Seminar Series of Spring 2026, featuring Professor Carli Coetzee, a scholar of African literature and cultural studies. Professor Coetzee will deliver a lecture titled “Africa || Asia as Method”.
Date & Time: Thursday February 12, 2026, 12:30 – 2:30 PM GST
Location: Auditorium, GSU (location map)
The session is free and open to the public.
2025 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of Chen Kuan-Hsing’s influential Asia as Method and the founding of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal. One of the major contributions of these projects is the deliberate multiplication of reference points within Asia, thereby de-emphasising a preoccupation with dominant Euro-American scholarly models. The Africa Institute (GSU) in Sharjah shares many of these intellectual aims as an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the study, research, and documentation of Africa, its people, and its cultures from its location in the Gulf. The presentation explores what these projects and intellectual communities can learn from one another in a process of inter-referencing the scholarly and activist traditions they nurture and publish. In doing so, it contributes to the creation of a densely inter-referential historical trajectory for cultural studies, informed by the multiple geo-locations of scholars thinking and writing about and from the majority world.
Carli Coetzee is a scholar of African literature and cultural studies whose work has made contributions to debates on language, ethics, and the politics of knowledge production about and from Africa. Her research asks how scholarship circulates across unequal geographies of publication and pedagogy, and how practices of editing, translation, and mentorship might resist the colonial hierarchies that structure global academia.
Across her career, Coetzee has insisted that the ethics of reading and writing are inseparable from questions of institutional location and intellectual responsibility. Her monographs Written Under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa (Boydell & Brewer / Wits University Press, 2019), winner of the African Literature Association’s award for Best Scholarly Monograph, and Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (Wits University Press, 2013), exemplify this approach.
Coetzee has also collaborated on editorial and mentoring projects. As long-standing editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and founder of the Journal Work Academy, she has created infrastructures of care that sustain Africa-based researchers, editors, and reviewers. Her collaborations with the Lagos Studies Association, the African Studies Association of Africa, and the University of the Witwatersrand have established an ethos of “journal work” as decolonial praxis, a slow, dialogic, and reparative form of intellectual labour that privileges collectivity over extraction. Coetzee’s current work continues to explore the ethics of writing and editing as a form of resistance to academic acceleration and its market logics.
Elizabeth Olayiwola is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Broadcast, Film, and Multimedia at the University of Abuja, Nigeria and is currently Okwui Enwezor Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture, Performance Studies, and Critical Humanities at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of film, women, and religious studies. Read more.
The seminar will be in English.
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