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.

A recuperative postcolonial project, African Ecomedia centralizes Africa “as the ground zero of the energy humanities” (10). Africa, however, is not alone in being the Western nations’ dumping ground and scapegoat. In Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, Brendon Nicholls suggests a necessary global confrontation of the pervasive “representational bestialization” (33) of indigenous cultures. Surprisingly, there is very little pessimism in both Iheka’s books even as L. Kantor points to the global south shouldering “the vast majority of the world’s disability burden” (Teaching 55). What Iheka is consistently at pains to highlight in his research is the exciting “ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies” (Teaching 1), a “corrective to mainstream [Eurocentric] ecocriticism” (2).

African Ecomedia successfully lays a formidable foundation for more equitable ecosystems investigated in the edited collection. Breaking new ground in the sole-authored book, Iheka necessarily belabors media infrastructures’ complicity in turning Africa into a “repressed and invisible factor … as the continent remains at the margins of intellectual discussions and geopolitics despite its major contribution to global modernity and the supply chain” (6). Iheka not only spotlights “what happens behind the scene of a global supply chain” (6), but he also complicates the Anthropocene by adding the factor of race. I read the book’s refrain as “Why can’t we be seen?”—a question fueled as much by the shortcomings of a technology still struggling to sufficiently light Black skin as by the “negative assumptions about Africa, and blackness more broadly, [which] have meant that the continent and its people hardly feature in forecasts of the future.” Iheka insists on Africa being seen as “a generative site for apprehending the ecologies of media alongside alternative media practices and modes of ethical living” (10). African Ecomedia, then, “offers a decolonial vision of the future that takes Africa seriously in tackling the planetary crisis” (10).

In both projects, Iheka teases out the terse relationship between what is allowed to occupy space and what is hidden away. In African Ecomedia there is an unrelenting rejection of the “dystopian vision of Africa” (26). To paraphrase Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, Iheka displays multiple stories and examples of Africa’s innovations in recycling, of how “excess can be transformed into something beautiful and conducive to an ecological ethics” (28). This is despite the reality of unequal and exploitative labor relationships and multinational companies like Trafigura dumping oil in the Ivory Coast, for example. Iheka concludes that “Trafigura’s impunity can only make sense if we link it to the view of Africa as trash” (69). It is in the trenches of the classroom that students in the West have the opportunity to undo these dangerous preconceptions of Africa that are embedded in a Eurocentric education. Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media not only addresses the gaps in previous MLA volumes on the pedagogy of environmental studies but also makes a concerted effort to decolonize spaces of learning, thus increasing students’ hope and eliminating anxiety (90) as Margaret Anne Smith puts it. While African Ecomedia teaches us to be responsible global citizens sensitive to the injustices rampant in the global south, specifically toward Black people and women, in the latter book Brendon Nicholls encourages educators to cultivate “a new kind of consciousness” in all students (Teaching 38), one that invites them to “reconceive their roles as cultural and economic consumers” as they “augment their status as environmental actors” (41).

In colonial discourses there is a slippery slope wherein the animal and human intersect in very racist ways; a deliberate effort to not only discount but, in some cases, exterminate people of color. Both of Iheka’s works under study here treat this conundrum delicately, problematizing a binary that puts humans atop the ladder of life. In a chapter titled “Human Meets Animal, Africa Meets Diaspora: The Conjunctions of Cecil the Lion and Black Lives Matter,” Iheka employs theories of conviviality and planetary humanism to explore the implication of dogs and trees in institutional racism, how “many black persons, especially in the diaspora, have sought to distance themselves from animals and nature” (African Ecomedia 155). But as Iheka rightly articulates, this particular response can trap one “within the colonial script” (155) where “people of colour are mainly absent from the conservation business except as manual laborers” (175–76). Changing this narrative requires an awareness of indigenous cosmologies that “predate the work in critical animal studies and new materialism, which seeks to decenter humans, critique the notion of human superiority, and relativize the degrees of difference between humans and animals” (156). Iheka underscores this point, again, in the introduction to the edited collection. He directs readers to indigenous cosmologies that provide “alternative conceptions of nature … antithetical to the notion of human superiority” (Teaching 6). In a chapter dedicated to the materiality of human lives, Jonathan Stinwand, for instance, explores literature’s role in facilitating a respect and empathy for animal rights and deaths. Amit R. Baishya is wary of “the grammar of animality” reducing animals to metaphors and allegory (Teaching 199). Baishya’s hope is for postcolonial animal studies effective enough to disturb “anthropocentric tendencies” by “exploring the genealogy of multispecies imaginaries in other global traditions” (207).

It is interesting how the very technology we use on a daily basis exacerbates the problems of invisibility Iheka wrestles with in his studies. While Sofia Ahlberg’s contribution on energy pedagogies uses literature to invite students’ consideration of “the ecological footprint of their own uses of portable digital technology through the lens of neocolonialism” (Teaching 242), Iheka, in African Ecomedia, foregrounds a photography that potently provides “a counternarrative to the derogatory, unflattering images of Africans in the colonial photographic imaginary” (16). Ultimately African Ecomedia, with its stunning visuals, proffers an uncompromising picture of an “Africa [that] may be struggling in other sectors, but its cultural economy has continued to yield a bountiful harvest, from literature to film to fashion” (17). Moreover, Iheka’s dazzling pan-African work exclaims the names and experiences of the Black bodies living in books, films, photographs, the world, and beyond.

By proposing “an expanded sense of the post-colonial” (Teaching 9), Iheka animates “colonized spaces in the Global North, especially in North America where there are well-demonstrated cases of the colonization and displacement of, and commission of slow violence against, Indigenous communities.” As Iheka suggests, “The volume is equally inspired by recent scholarship that has sought to interpret Native American, Latin American and Latinx, and African American literature from a postcolonial perspective” (Teaching 9). In other words, much like continental Africa, the global north is fertile ground for ecocrimes mostly playing out in racialized spaces like Flint, Michigan. The legacy of colonialism, etched on the Caribbean’s very landscape, explains why Iheka, like many other scholars, uses the term postcolonial quite cautiously. Charly Verstraet coins the term dEcolonization for the “aesthetic consumption of the [Caribbean] landscape by Western nations, corporations, and consumers” (Teaching 253). The Caribbean islands are mired in a history Verstraet describes as “marked by the separation between the land and its people, first with the crossing of the Middle Passage, then with the brutal plantation system …” (261). Today, these violent cleavages persist with “greener pastures” supposedly in America and England. The African continent faces a similar crisis driven by perceived economic depravation. But there is no peace to be had as African migrants in the West are treated like “vermin to be squashed” (African Ecomedia 150). For Iheka, therefore, far better the “promot[ion] [of] sustainable practices that will support the flourishing of lives on the continent” (151).

Even as China’s complex ecological footprint arguably threatens the agency, gains, and innovations Iheka shows off in African Ecomedia, much still survives for celebration including African women who “play a critical role in forging the image of the Delta as a lived space populated by active agents working toward social transformation” (135). Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media ventures further in exploring how, according to Laura Wright, “the notion of the liminal helps students engage with the taboo space between oppositions, allowing them to recognize alternative sexualities within postcolonial narratives as disruptive of dualistic thought” (47). The collection also spotlights grassroots’ organizations’ fight for environmental justice even with the powers-that-be threatening their derailment (Caminero-Santangelo, Teaching 24).

Both African Ecomedia and Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media raise awareness about how the world is really organized, the global north “contributing disproportionately to climate change” (Cesare, Teaching 99) and the global east largely uninvestigated as both colonizer and colonized. It is these very same spaces of privilege, however, that are potentially promising ground for the visibility, legitimization, and diversity of what is otherwise suppressed, but only if institutions were supportive and attentive. For it is in the sometimes ignored, unseen spaces between disciplines that real change can happen, where professors of color can feel at home in their offices and classrooms; where, as Simon C. Estok posits, the English language is simply a language among many, not so dominant that it leaves untranslated “a large amount of ecocritical work done on East Asian texts” (Teaching 173).

What is brought to the surface in our research and teaching if we seriously consider Iheka’s truism that “[Western] modernity itself is synonymous with waste” (African Ecomedia 58)? What openings lie in spheres like virtual game environments? What is the potential of a pedagogy attuned to “the easy slippage between place-based education and tourism” (Dimick and Johnson, Teaching 348)? In these times of endemic diseases, we should be quite convinced of Iheka’s insightful reading sharpening both our civic skills and inner wisdoms as well as an imperfect media that will hopefully usher a world in which “human and nonhuman lives on the continent [of Africa] will count as much as those of the privileged in the countries of Europe and America” (151). We should be equally convinced of the value of teaching about the theft of land and mineral resources from the Caribbean, Asia, and other formerly colonized countries around the globe, thus arousing in students the sense of ecological empathy, a desire for justice, and a yearning for “new bases for hope and healing” (Iheka, Teaching 30).