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.

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.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. African Art History and the Medium Concept  1
1. Film as Light, Film as Indigenous  31
2. Electronic Sound as Trance ad Resonance  61
3. The Song as Private Property  93
4. Artificial Blackness, or Extraction as Abstraction  119
5. "The Earth and the Substratum Are Not Enough"  153
6. The Seed and the Field  183
Afterword  211
Notes  215
Bibliography  237
Index