African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka

Abstract

Reviewed by: African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka Sheila Petty (bio) African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka. Duke University Press. 2021. 336 pages. $104.95 hardcover; $27.95 paper; also available in e-book. Cajetan Iheka’s outstanding book on environmental issues in African visual culture and screen media paves the way for scholarship in African ecocritical studies. Organized into five chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics shows how, through film, video art, photography, sculpture, and other media, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. What, for Africa, Iheka asks, is the price of “the ecological footprint of media”?1 He posits that Africans “are disproportionately affected by the distribution of ecological risks” and calls for “empathetic labor” that “is nonexploitative, and is calibrated around the flourishing of various life forms in Africa and beyond.”2 Iheka’s work underscores the significance of African cultural artifacts and their centrality in ecomedia studies and provides a model for twenty-first-century ecological media studies that combine media arts, resource media, and elemental media (e.g., fire, air, water, and earth). The author’s main goal is to expose a grand narrative of global entanglements and to uncover the ecological, social, and human expense to Africa of production and consumption of global media. Iheka’s project probes the implications of resource extraction on the African continent and the ethics of presenting [End Page 204] these images to the world. His methodology constitutes an approach he calls “insightful reading,” which is contextual, located in historical and environmental frames, and allows for consideration of an image’s deep structure through holistic analysis of its cinematic properties.3 In chapter 1, Iheka is concerned with temporal entanglements, which he explores through Wanuri Kahiu’s short science fiction film Pumzi (2009) and Fabrice Monteiro’s series of photographs titled The Prophecy (2015). He argues that both media examples draw on previous African traditions and myths specific to their cultures and blend conventions of artistic genres, African philosophy, and supernatural beliefs. Although Iheka relies somewhat on the Afrofuturism discourse of Mark Dery and Alondra Nelson in this chapter, he is careful to not allow African Indigenous concerns to be overshadowed by the African American frame of Afrofuturism.4 He further asserts that both artists foreground the aesthetics of waste recycling and recuperation. Iheka regrets that Pumzi’s emancipatory thrust is overshadowed by the sacrifice the main character Asha (Kudzani Moswela) must make of her life in order to counter the death of a tree. Monteiro’s photographs foreground their constructed nature by showing extra-human African figures maneuvering through post-apocalyptic backgrounds that include oceans, junkyards, and masses of trash. The figures are clothed in nets, cables, and other objects salvaged from oceans and landfills. Iheka maintains that these artists’ works proffer a culture of hope through recycling and reuse. He further proffers that these works constitute the fruits of a shriving process on the part of the artists as they work through and past complicated traumas of racial, cultural, and global magnitude. Chapter 2 extends Iheka’s discussion of temporal networks by reading spatial interconnections in Pieter Hugo’s series of photographs titled Permanent Error (2011), which depicts recycling of electronic waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, and Franck Bieleu’s documentary film The Big Banana (2011), which documents the workings of a transnational banana plantation in Cameroon. The author takes up the issue of labor and its various entangled forms of exploited African unwaged and digital labor that enable planetary communications technology. Chapter 3 extends this theme by probing the ecological and human trauma produced by resource extraction in Nigeria (oil) and Niger (uranium). Michael Watt and Ed Kashi’s Curse of the Black Gold (2008), a collaborative work of fiction, poetry, essays, photographs, interviews, and a letter, “paints the image of a future tainted by oil toxicity” in the Niger Delta, while Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s film Arlit, deuxième Paris (Arlit: The Second Paris, 2005) depicts how extractive uranium strip mining in the town of Arlit...