Xi “Títílayọ̀” Jin (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of African Cultural Studies, with a Minor in Visual Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her fields of specialization include restitution, decoloniality, and critical museum studies.
Her dissertation, If the Object Could Run: Misrecognized Mediators, Encountered Affinities, and the Ethics of Restitution, examines African responses to restitution across literature, film, performance, and curatorial practice. Centering African agency, the project explores how writers, artists, and curators reconfigure the scope, form, and scale of restitution—not from a legacy of colonial guilt, but from Africa’s generative visions of relation.
Drawing on African ontologies, Black studies, and Thing Theory, her work unsettles Eurocentric, nation-bound frameworks and reframes restitution as an ongoing, contested process—shaped not by legal closure, but by dissonance, desire, and the labor of reattachment. Restitution, in her account, is not a return to origin but a relational, affective, and ontological reactivation.
Her paper titled “An Eastern Gaze: Reconsidering ‘African Art’ from a Chinese Perspective” appears in Entangled Histories and Ambivalent Feelings: China and Africa Encounters in Culture and Media (Routledge, 2025).