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Cajetan Iheka’s African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (2021) and his edited collection, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022), importantly privilege—indeed celebrate—non-Western epistemologies at the very forefront of ecocriticism. In the former book, Africa is not “lagging” behind but is modeling sustainability for the future. This is a resourceful continent even in the face of “nonrenewable infrastructures dotting the continent’s environment” (11). Iheka offers a meticulous historical contextualization of Africa’s present economic demise while beautifully answering the question, “Why can’t we be seen?” (African Ecomedia 105). Kisilu Musya, a famer in Julia Dahr’s climate change film Thank You For the Rain (2017), makes this query, which cannot be ignored in a book rich in both its theoretical frameworks and interventions in fields such as African and media studies as well as the energy and environmental humanities. Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media advances Iheka’s agenda to make the invisible visible. Ultimately, the various ecomedia employed in Iheka’s works suggest an Anthropocene implicated in global degradation. As users of smartphones and paper, we are the problem as well as the solution to more ethical, postcolonial ecologies.
A recuperative postcolonial project, African Ecomedia centralizes Africa “as the ground zero of the energy humanities” (10). Africa, however, is not alone in being the Western nations’ dumping ground and scapegoat. In Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, Brendon Nicholls suggests a necessary global confrontation of the pervasive “representational bestialization” (33) of indigenous cultures. Surprisingly, there is very little pessimism in both Iheka’s books even as L. Kantor points to the global south shouldering “the vast majority of the world’s disability burden” (Teaching 55). What Iheka is consistently at pains to highlight in his research is the exciting “ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies” (Teaching 1), a “corrective to mainstream [Eurocentric] ecocriticism” (2).
African Ecomedia successfully lays a formidable foundation for more equitable ecosystems investigated in the edited collection. Breaking new ground in the sole-authored book, Iheka necessarily belabors media infrastructures’ complicity in turning Africa into a “repressed and invisible factor … as the continent remains at the margins of intellectual discussions and geopolitics despite its major contribution to global modernity and the supply chain” (6). Iheka not only spotlights “what happens behind the...