"African Ecomedia positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure in media studies. Africa is the place where media technologies derive essential components and the place in which they often end up as obsolete matter. Examining film, photography, video art, sculpture, and 3D architectural rendering, Cajetan Iheka argues that African representational arts provide the appropriate site for understanding the ecological footprint of media, and they offer examples of the infinite resourcefulness crucial for an era of finite resources. Working with a method termed "insightful reading," African Ecomedia reorients the fields of African studies, media studies, energy humanities, and the environmental humanities. Thedecolonial impulse animating the book foregrounds Africa as site of novel epistemological possibilities and sustainable innovations in a time of planetary crisis"--
Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture, showing how African visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture deliver a unique perspective on the socio-ecological costs of media production.
In African Ecomedia, Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socio-ecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation, but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.
