Africa at Noon

media release: Every Wednesday at noon — since 1973! — African Studies Program faculty, students, and community members have gathered for AFRICA AT NOON, a one-hour weekly lecture series bringing diverse African research from scholars around the world to a campus and community audience.

Due to technical limitations, we are currently unable to support hybrid events. All Africa at Noon series will be 100% virtual or 100% in person in Room 206 this semester until further notice. Apologies for the inconvenience.

“Teaching and Learning in a Time of Waithood," by Carli Coetzee.

Over the last years, since the start of the global pandemic, many of us have on any given day been able to log on to attend a seminar at Makerere, at African Studies Program UWM, or at the Africa Institute Sharjah, creating an optimistic illusion of a horizontally connected academic world. Yet this promise of connectedness exaggerated, rather than diminished, the resource disparities within the global academic community. How can our experiences of this unequal on-line world shape us, nudging us to more closely resemble the figure Tejumola Olaniyan theorized as the “interstitial” scholar: someone who is ethically accountable, intellectually mobile, theoretically agile; and who is able to think about – and from – many places?

BIO: Carli Coetzee is a Research Associate at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on African literature and African popular cultural studies, and on the ethics of knowledge production about and from Africa. She has previously held positions at the University of the Western Cape, University of Cape Town, SOAS University of London and Queen Mary University and has held fellowships at Harvard University and Wits University. She is the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and is the president of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.  Her monograph Written Under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa was published in 2019 in the African Articulations series of James Currey/Boydell & Brewer (https://boydellandbrewer.com/written-under-the-skin-hb.html).