2026
The Cultural Politics of Food in South Africa: Media, Nourishment, Inequality
Editors: Mehita Iqani and Sarah Gibson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Publication date: March 2026
Food is both a material system of nourishment, necessary for human survival, and a communicative system that signifies multiple meanings across human cultures. This book explores the cultural politics of food in the South African context, bringing together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the links between media, nourishment, and inequality. The chapters all highlight the multiplicity of meanings that food has in South African society. These include historical perspectives on the impact of colonialism, migration and apartheid had on food and foodways in South Africa; sociological interventions on food and society; aesthetic practices in relation to food; and mediated food cultures in South Africa. Taken together, the book critically explores the multiple ways in which food is never just food, and always linked to complex and shifting modalities of meaning and knowledge in the South African context.
2025
sea_ice (Vol. 3 in the FicSci Series)
Editors: Mehita Iqani and Wamuwi Mbao
Publisher: African Minds
Publication date: 1 August 2025
This collection offers writing that emerged from an encounter between creative writers and a sea ice scientist, who is based in a chemical and materials engineering department. The presented research invited contemplation of scientific aspects of the properties, formation and behaviour of sea ice, especially in the Southern Ocean. The creative writings that emerged offer new directions for thinking about the relation between creative expression and Antarctic science.
Johannesburg from the Riverbanks: Navigating The Jukskei
Editors: Mehita Iqani and Renugan Raidoo
Publisher: HSRC Press
Publication date: 31 July 2025
This collection gathers diverse voices and perspectives to explore the complex, and often contradictory, ways Johannesburg connects with one of its defining rivers. It is a rich collection of stories showing how Johannesburg and the Jukskei River continuously shape one another. Through vivid chapters and striking images from artists, activists, scientists, urban planners, and historians, this book invites readers to see the river and the city anew.
2024
night_sky (Vol. 2 in the FicSci Series)
Editors: Mehita Iqani and Wamuwi Mbao
Publisher: African Minds
Publication date: 14 August 2024
Working outwards from a theoretical framework that sees the sciences as discourses constructed by human endeavour through forms of language and practices of authority, this collection offers writing that emerged from a scientific encounter. It explores the relationship between creativity and scientific experiment, between the languages deployed by scientists in their experiments and analyses and the languages forged by creatives in their ongoing efforts to understand the human condition. FicSci 02 brought twelve creative writers together with an astronomer, exploring scientific aspects of the night sky, in specific X-ray binary stars, extra-galactic sources, and magellanic clouds.
2023
Flow (Vol. 1 in the FicSci Series)
Editors: Mehita Iqani and Wamuwi Mbao
Publisher: African Minds
Publication date: 14 July 2023
Working outwards from a theoretical framework that sees the sciences as discourses constructed by human endeavour through forms of language and practices of authority, this collection offers writing that emerged from a scientific encounter. It explores the relationship between creativity and scientific experiment, between the languages deployed by scientists in their experiments and analyses and the languages forged by creatives in their ongoing efforts to understand the human condition. FicSci 01 brought eleven creative writers together with a biomechanical engineer, unpacking different aspects of flow, that physical property that is so central to research in fluid mechanics.
African Luxury Branding: From Soft Power to Queer Futures
Editor: Mehita Iqani
Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
Publication date: 10 January 2023
Bringing together critical race, queer and decolonial analytical approaches, visual analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis, this book explores the discursive strategies deployed by African luxury brands in an age of cross-platform, intertextual branding. Shedding new light not only on luxury branding strategies but also on the idea of a luxurious global “Africanicity” and on the complex cultural politics of South Africa, African Luxury Branding will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in disciplines, including Critical Advertising Studies, African Studies, Media and Communications.
2021
Garbage in Popular Culture: Consumption and the Aesthetics of Waste
Editors: Mehita Iqani
Publisher: The State University of New York (SUNY), New York
Publication date: July 2021
Garbage in Popular Culture is the first book to explicitly link media discourse, consumer culture and the cultural politics of garbage in contemporary global society. It makes an original contribution to the areas of consumer culture studies, visual culture, media and communications, and cultural theory through a critical analysis of the ways in which waste and garbage are visually communicated in the public realm. Mehita Iqani examines three key themes evident in the global representation of garbage: questions of agency and activism, cultures of hedonism and luxury, and anxieties about devastation and its affect. Each theme is explored through a number of case studies, including zero-waste recycling campaigns communicated on Instagram, to fine art made with waste, popular entertainment festivals, tropical beach tourism, and films about oil spills and plastic waste in oceans. Iqani argues that we need a new vocabulary to think about what it means to be human in this new age of consumption-produced waste, and reflects on what rubbish allows us to learn about our relationship with the natural world.