Overview

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 Cisse'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.

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9781478008835

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Reviews

Delinda Collier's Media Primitivism is a remarkable journey into the intellectual development of twentieth-century African art and how art objects themselves resist the categories accorded to them. Theoretically sophisticated and brilliantly argued, Media Primitivism poses a serious challenge to those who like their African art suspended in a primordial past. -- Steven Nelson, author of * From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa * Media Primitivism is an important book that will resituate both media history and the historiography of African art. Delinda Collier convincingly argues that, from electronic music to world cinema, African technologies are not additions to electricity-based media but function as the very basis of them. The historiography is thrilling, the aesthetic analyses compelling, and the theoretical synthesis at times breathtaking. -- Laura U. Marks, author of * Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image *

Media Primitivism is an important book that will resituate both media history and the historiography of African art. Delinda Collier convincingly argues that, from electronic music to world cinema, African technologies are not additions to electricity-based media but function as the very basis of them. The historiography is thrilling, the aesthetic analyses compelling, and the theoretical synthesis at times breathtaking. -- Laura U. Marks, author of * Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image * Delinda Collier's Media Primitivism is a remarkable journey into the intellectual development of twentieth-century African art and how art objects themselves resist the categories accorded to them. Theoretically sophisticated and brilliantly argued, Media Primitivism poses a serious challenge to those who like their African art suspended in a primordial past. -- Steven Nelson, author of * From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa *

Delinda Collier's Media Primitivism is a remarkable journey into the intellectual development of twentieth-century African art and how art objects themselves resist the categories accorded to them. Theoretically sophisticated and brilliantly argued, Media Primitivism poses a serious challenge to those who like their African art suspended in a primordial past. -- Steven Nelson, author of * From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa * Media Primitivism is an important book that will resituate both media history and the historiography of African art. Delinda Collier convincingly argues that, from electronic music to world cinema, African technologies are not additions to electricity-based media but function as the very basis of them. The historiography is thrilling, the aesthetic analyses compelling, and the theoretical synthesis at times breathtaking. -- Laura U. Marks, author of * Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image * Media Primitivism is a nuanced and singular intellectual project that stands to make an impact across the fields of African art, media studies, and art history. . . . Its most exciting contribution is that it breathes new life into the theoretical possibilities proposed by African art itself. -- Allison K. Young * African Arts * Media Primitivism is a compelling book that blends media theory, art history, and African art history in a masterful act of theoretical weaving on the part of its author. . . . Tracing deeper technological histories on the continent . . . proves that the question of Africa (as a place and idea) is not additive to media studies, but a foundational aspect of it. -- Alexandra M. Thomas * Media-N *

“Delinda Collier's Media Primitivism is a remarkable journey into the intellectual development of twentieth-century African art and how art objects themselves resist the categories accorded to them. Theoretically sophisticated and brilliantly argued, Media Primitivism poses a serious challenge to those who like their African art suspended in a primordial past.” -- Steven Nelson, author of * From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa * “Media Primitivism is an important book that will resituate both media history and the historiography of African art. Delinda Collier convincingly argues that, from electronic music to world cinema, African technologies are not additions to electricity-based media but function as the very basis of them. The historiography is thrilling, the aesthetic analyses compelling, and the theoretical synthesis at times breathtaking.” -- Laura U. Marks, author of * Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image * “Media Primitivism is a nuanced and singular intellectual project that stands to make an impact across the fields of African art, media studies, and art history. . . . Its most exciting contribution is that it breathes new life into the theoretical possibilities proposed by African art itself.” -- Allison K. Young * African Arts * “Media Primitivism is a compelling book that blends media theory, art history, and African art history in a masterful act of theoretical weaving on the part of its author. . . . Tracing deeper technological histories on the continent . . . proves that the question of Africa (as a place and idea) is not additive to media studies, but a foundational aspect of it.” -- Alexandra M. Thomas * Media-N *

Author Information

Delinda Collier is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art.

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