African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Cajetan Iheka on his new book, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics. Through studies of African media arts like film and photography, as well as extractive resources like oil and uranium, the book positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure. From the Afrofuturist visions of Black Panther to the media reception of the 2015 killing of Cecil the Lion, Iheka examines how African media makers have reckoned with issues of mineral extraction and animal conservation. As communities across the globe grapple with the challenges of climate change, Iheka’s book demonstrates the role of visual media in raising awareness of our planet’s finite natural resources and the traumatic futures of ecological disaster. 

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Bio

Cajetan Iheka is Associate Professor of English at Yale University, specializing in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His new monograph, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics, was published by Duke University Press in 2021. Professor Iheka is editor of the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. He also coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (University of Rochester Press, 2018), and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in refereed venues such as New Literary History, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Environmental Ethics, Research in African Literatures, The Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, and the Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics. He currently serves as deputy editor of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.