African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics By Cajetan Iheka

Abstract

Reviewed by: African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka Christopher R. Hebert African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics BY CAJETAN IHEKA Duke UP, 2021. xiii + 322 pp. ISBN 9781478014744 paper. Cajetan Iheka's African Ecomedia, his first full-length work following Naturalizing Africa (2017), is a continuation of his focus on the intersection between African cultural expression and environmental issues on the continent. Unlike Naturalizing Africa, which discusses literary texts across a broad geographical range, African Ecomedia turns toward visual culture, to include films (both documentary and fictional), photographs, sculpture, and video art. Iheka broadly demarcates the "media" within this book into three different kinds: media arts (film, photography), resource media (oil, uranium), and elemental media (earth, air, water, fire) (8). Importantly, these three kinds of media are linked through transnational networks that often prioritize Western consumption over the ecological health of African environments and the well-being of African laborers who work with e-waste or dangerous resource media. By foregrounding these different kinds of media as well as their networks of production and consumption, African [End Page 190] Ecomedia broadly expands the purview of the environmental humanities and provides a framework for a nuanced discussion of media in a world that is radically interconnected. Iheka's task in this work, therefore, is not only to explicate different representations of the environment in African visual culture, but also to untangle the complicated itineraries of media in all its materiality on the African continent. Iheka's first chapter opens with a discussion of Wanuri Kahiu's film Pumzi and Fabrice Monteiro's photographic collection The Prophecy from the perspective of temporal entanglement. By calling attention to the ways in which these artists incorporate elements of the past in their new-media creations, Iheka identifies important threads of continuity between ecological attitudes of the past and those of an imagined future, most interestingly through the waste aesthetics of Monteiro's photographs. His second and third chapters approach environmental issues in various films and photography collections through the idea of spatial entanglement—for example, excessive consumption of electronic goods in Europe and North America directly contributes to rapidly growing e-waste sites in Ghana, just as a thirst for oil in the industrial centers of the Global North has traumatizing effects on resource centers in Africa, particularly the Niger Delta region. His examination of Pieter Hugo's photography collection Permanent Error in chapter two is especially salient, as he deftly analyzes the photos of burning waste in Agbogbloshie not as "poverty porn" but to explain the "logics of exploitation" that the images reveal (66). Iheka's fourth chapter focuses on the circulation of a grisly safari trophy-photo shortly after the death of Cecil the Lion and, importantly, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2015. This photo and its viral trajectory "allows for apprehending vulnerabilities across species" (153). In this chapter, Iheka also calls for more attention toward "interspecies entanglement"—and he cites Orlando von Einsiedel's film Virunga as a positive example of media that "activates a borderland for intertwining human-nonhuman interests" (153). Finally, his fifth chapter explores African cities and their urban spaces as sites of precarity as well as sustainability. His analysis of Wu Jing's Wolf Warrior 2, a Chinese film set in an African city, is especially interesting as it underscores the struggle for influence in Africa between China and the West, as well as the racist ideologies at the heart of much media that takes Africa as its subject. As he notes, "in every battle in which elephants fight, the grass—in this case the African space and the continent's inhabitants—suffers" (207). One of the biggest strengths of Iheka's work in African Ecomedia is his commitment to a practice of what he calls insightful reading—a way of responsibly engaging with media arts that depict ecological degradation and human suffering. For example, Iheka does not turn away from the haunting photographs of young Ghanaian e-waste workers in Pieter Hugo's Permanent Error, nor does he downplay the future trauma that ordinary people will experience in the Niger Delta or in Arlit, where oil exploration and the mining of...