African Energy Worlds in Film and Media

"African Energy Worlds is an inspired and inspirational study of the imbrications of energy and film in Africa. Carmela Garritano presents African film as an important medium for understanding the unevenness of energy logics in a neoliberal era, engaging with the violence of energy generation in Africa as well its possibilities. The resulting book is hermeneutically rich and theoretically innovative as it breaks new grounds in African film and media studies and the energy and environmental humanities."

~Cajetan Iheka, author of African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics

"African Energy Worlds challenges entrenched notions of Africans as vulnerable, passive victims of environmental injustice. Instead, Garritano shows how contemporary media, energy, water, and waste disposal infrastructures intersect in surprising ways: while electricity allows filmmakers' creativity to flourish, unreliable access also elicits creative responses among Africans as active producers and consumers of both energy and film. The humble plastic flip-flop opened a hopeful path toward education and postcolonial national development. Spanning the diverse scales of hyperlocal movie cultures and transnational partnerships, this book offers an indispensable overview of the breadth and depth of African filmmaking since the 1990s, with revelatory re-readings of familiar favorites and attention to lesser-known gems. Garritano traces multifaceted connections between film and modernity, by demonstrating how digital effects can "materialize magic" and occult worlds onscreen while also insisting on the urgency of Africans' modest demands for inclusion in the benefits of petromodernity and a more just world beyond fossil fuels. A highly readable and necessary book, brimming with important insights for advocates for energy and climate justice as well as scholars in African and film studies and environmental and energy humanities."

~Jennifer Wenzel, author of The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature