Media Primitivism

Technological Art in Africa

Delinda Collier

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781478009696
  9781478008835
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478012313
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh's Ta'abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. African Art History and the Medium Concept
• One. Film as Light, Film as Indigenous
• Two. Electronic Sound as Trance and Resonance
• Three. The Song as Private Property
• Four. Artificial Blackness, or Extraction as Abstraction
• Five. “The Earth and the Substratum Are Not Enough”
• Six. The Seed and the Field
• Afterword
• Color Plates
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index