African Ecomedia

Cajetan Iheka is Associate Professor of English at Yale University, author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature, editor of Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and coeditor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.

• List of Illustrations  ixAcknowledgments  xiIntroduction  11. Waste Reconsidered: Afrofuturism, Technologies of the Past, and the History of the Future  252. Spatial Networks, Toxic Ecoscapes, and (In)visible Labor  643. Ecologies of Oil and Uranium: Extractive Energy and the Trauma of the Future  1084. Human Meets Animal, Africa Meets Diaspora: The Conjunctions of Cecil the Lion and Black Lives Matter  1525. African Urban Ecologies: Transcriptions of Precarity, Creativity, and Futurity  186Epilogue. Toward Imperfect Media  221Notes  231Bibliography  273Index  305

“Cajetan Iheka writes of the most pressing and complicated issues with clear-sightedness. This major contribution will undoubtedly reach beyond the academy to become a stirring call to anyone interested in the interconnectedness engendered by globalization and the attendant toxicity and suffering that have been unleashed on various populations across Africa and elsewhere. This is truly a joy to read.” - Ato Quayson, author of (Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature) “This outstanding book powerfully reorients ecocritical studies. Cajetan Iheka has taken on three of the most pressing issues of our times: the aftermath of colonialism and globalization; the social intensification of communications media; and the environmental impact of human societies. His scholarship is impressive in its scope and depth, his thinking original and significant. African Ecomedia will reverberate with students and researchers in media and communications, environmental humanities, ecocritical studies, anthropology, and social sciences.” - Sean Cubitt, author of (Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies) "A provocative account of how contemporary works of African visual culture embody the 'infinite resourcefulness' needed to survive an anthropogenic planet defined by the 'limitedness of resources.'" - Michael Dango (ASAP/Journal) “Iheka provides piercing analyses of the ecological footprints of media technologies in Africa and the representation in media of ecological issues affecting Africa. [He] challenges all media forms to remind humanity of the environmental crisis and climate change, African lessons on sustainable ways of consuming energy, and the opportunities to improve quality of life. Recommended. All readers.”- Z. N. Nchinda (Choice) “[Iheka] makes a resounding case for the centrality of African ecomedia in confronting the most critical issues of our time, which makes this book equally as indispensable.” - Dustin Crowley (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) "Iheka’s work demonstrates the centrality of pollution to media infrastructure, foregrounding the toxicity that is produced both at the point of extraction of resources and at the end point of disposal, following the planned obsolescence of media devices. . . . African Ecomedia’s analysis of diverse African contexts carries out vital work to counteract the dynamics of invisibility that they depend upon." - Rebecca Macklin (Year's Work in Ecocriticism) “The arguments in Cajetan Iheka’s [African Ecomedia] are clever and exciting, and the book as artefact is a thing of great beauty.” - Carli Coetzee (Journal of the African Literature Association) “Iheka offers a meticulous historical contextualization of Africa’s present economic demise while beautifully answering the question, ‘Why can’t we be seen?’ . . . A recuperative postcolonial project, African Ecomedia centralizes Africa ‘as the ground zero of the energy humanities.’” - Gugu Hlongwane (Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry) “Cajetan Iheka’s outstanding book on environmental issues in African visual culture and screen media paves the way for scholarship in African ecocritical studies. . . . The main strength of African Ecomedia lies in how Iheka builds on previous Anthropocene scholarship by focusing on the Global South, specifically the dependence and complicity in the ecological footprint of visual media in Africa. The volume essentially advocates for media practices arising from the African continent that are innovatively and ecologically framed.” - Sheila Petty (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies) "Part of what makes African Ecomedia truly ambitious is that the book brings together a range of often siloed fields, from African studies, environmental humanities, and energy humanities, to literary studies and media studies. Iheka makes the case for why Africa needs to be seen as more than a place of environmental crisis." - Jacob Dlamini (H-Environment, H-Net Reviews)