Carmela Garritano on African Cinema and Energy Humanities

ALA Lecture Series
Speaker: Carmela Garritano on African Cinema and Energy Humanities
Saturday, April 26, 2025 at 11:00 AM EST; London, 4:00 PM; Lagos, 4:00 PM; Johannesburg, 5:00 PM; Nairobi, 6:00 PM

In this talk, Carmela Garritano will discuss energy humanities and explore energy as a theoretical framework for analyzing African cinema. She’ll describe her new book, which came out in March, and say a few words about her interpretations of the films featured in it.

Dr. Carmela Garritano is an associate professor in the Department of International Affairs and an affiliated faculty in the Africana Studies program. She currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her areas of specialization include African film and screen media (with a research focus on Ghana); and energy humanities. Garritano works at the intersection of politics and film and media, and her research has been supported by Fulbright, the West African Research Association, and the US Department of Education. Trained in African area studies, her writing combines theoretically-grounded inquiry with film studies, ethnographic, and archival research methods.

Her first book African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (Ohio University Press, 2013) was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and was awarded The First Book Award by the African Literature Association. Dr. Garritano’s second single-authored book African Energy Worlds in Film and Media (Indiana University Press, 2025) joins the work of energy humanists to analyze the social dimensions of energy forms and systems as represented in African cinema and to map the infrastructural links between electricity and local film production. Garritano’s current book project is tentatively called African Plasticity: A Cultural History of Plastics in Ghana. It investigates plastic production, consumption, recycling, policy, and art in Ghana from the end of the colonial period to the present.