Review essay on African Ecomedia and Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature

Abstract

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.