front cover of African Ecomedia
African Ecomedia
Network Forms, Planetary Politics
Cajetan Iheka
Duke University Press, 2021
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 socioecological 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.
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front cover of Environmental Futures
Environmental Futures
An International Literary Anthology
Edited by Caren Irr, et al.
Brandeis University Press, 2024
A global anthology, curated by experts from around the world, draws on fiction and poetry to examine environmental challenges and their implications for communities.
 
Featuring short stories, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction from around the world, this anthology showcases contemporary literature to envision the future of the environment. While environmental literature written in English has been dominated by English and American men who make solo explorations into an unspoiled natural world, Environmental Futures emphasizes local and indigenous writers contending with global landscapes that are far from pristine. Their work opens up decolonial perspectives from Anglophone Africa, South Asia, India, China, South America, the peripheries of Europe, and BIPoC North America. Introducing many writers who will be unfamiliar to English-speaking readers, this collection explores resistance to the oil economy, the impact of storms and natural disasters, extinction, and relations between humans and animals, among other themes.
 
The pieces are organized by geographical area in five sections: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Expert scholars and translators—Kurt Cavender, Roberto Forns-Broggi, Cajetan Iheka, Upamanyu (Pablo) Mukherjee, Irina Sadovina, and Shaobo Xie—selected the works and provided critical introductions for each section.
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Horizontal Comparison
Africa, the Caribbean, and the Making of Black World Literature
Cajetan Iheka
University of Chicago Press

By analyzing African and Caribbean texts on their own terms, Horizontal Comparison articulates new forms of transoceanic solidarity.

The fields of comparative literature and Black Atlantic studies have an Africa problem: despite sustained attempts to decenter Western paradigms, they still privilege the United States and Europe as the primary loci of reference. So argues Cajetan Iheka in Horizontal Comparison, which aims to redirect both fields toward a non-hierarchical, South-South orientation focusing on the links between Africa and the Caribbean. 

By analyzing the literary work and real-life trajectories of writers such as Peter Abrahams, Chimamanda Adichie, Maryse Condé, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, Claude McKay, Dinaw Mengestu, Ferdinand Oyono, Taiye Selasi, and Sam Selvon, Iheka draws our attention to the ways in which African and Caribbean texts inform and mutually constitute each other, bypassing the usual comparisons to Western literary canons. The book challenges not only Western cultural hegemony in the study of global Black writing, but also the very methodologies of comparative literary studies, offering fresh insights into reading, trauma, character, and the “worlding” of literature.

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