A Conversation in the Humanities in Session Series at the Centre for Humanities Research, as part of the Advanced Research Seminar.
Date: 8th September 2023
Time: 2:30pm – 4:30pm SAST
Venue: Greatmore Humanities Hub
Please RSVP Micaela Felix at centreforhumanitiesresearch@uwc.ac.za
Cajetan Iheka is Professor of English at Yale University, specializing in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He serves as Director of the Whitney Humanities Center and as Chair of the Council on African Studies at Yale. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association.
This Humanities in Session lecture is based on Iheka’s latest book, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021), which examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. In this book, 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.