Collier, Delinda. Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012313.

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.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Doug Coltart

Attorney, Mtetwa & Nyambirai Legal Practitioners

Sector:

Law

Location:

Zimbabwe

Contact:

dougc@mandn.co.zw

Connected  Development (CODE)

Non-Governmental Organization

Location: Abuja, Nigeria

connecteddevelopment.org

Description:

A Nigerian NGO which works on accountable governance.

Cooke, Paul. “Soft Power and South African Film: Negotiating Mutually Incompatible Agendas?” New Cinemas 14, n^o 1 (2016): 93‑109. https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin.14.1.93_1.

This article offers the first analysis of the role of film as a soft power asset in South Africa. It examines ways in which the policy priorities of the South African government have, until recently, seemed to work against the nation’s strategic aim to use film as a tool to leverage soft power in order to gain political influence across Africa, as well as to maximize the economic potential of globalization. The South African film economy is booming. Cape Town, in particular, has become a key production centre globally. International productions are attracted to the country by the versatility of its locations, its weather and its low cost, high quality, facilities.

[Excerpt from the article abstract].

Coquet, Michèle. Arts de cour en Afrique noire [Court Arts in Black Africa]. Paris: ABiro, 1996.

African royalties, such as the ones found in the East and the West, engaged artists’ services. Royal power relied on arts to build itself, spread and impose their own aesthetics. In these societies with no writing, symbols of sovereignty, such as crowns, headdresses, scepters, thrones, etc., are real works of art that fully participate, through their diffusion, to the extension of royal power.

[Source: Decitre.fr, adapted and translated from French].

Louphou Coulibaly

Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Email: c.louphou@gmail.com/lcoulibaly@wisc.edu

Council for International African Fashion Education (Ciafe)

Research centre

Accra, Ghana

https://www.ciafe.org/

Description:

CIAFE is an education hub and a research centre dedicated to supporting the development and innovation of fashion education in Africa.

Courrèges, Emmanuelle. Africa: The Fashion Continent. Paris: Flammarion, 2022.

From the runway in Lagos and music festivals in Casablanca or Nairobi, to the “image makers” of Marrakech and the influencers of Dakar or Accra, a new generation of African fashion designers, photographers, bloggers, and hair and makeup artists are redefining the aesthetic contours of the continent. Audacious, humorous, disruptive, and innovative are the by words of these young creatives who, while drawing upon and reval­orizing their heritage, offer an ultra-contemporary perspective on fashion today. A creative revolution is spreading in an extension of continental revindication through cultural reappropriation and the invention of a visual language. Appliqué figures straight from Ghanaian Asafo flags seem to chant modern slogans as they march across silk dresses, traditional textile prints give power back to women, and Xhosa beaded embroidery serves as an inspiration for modern knitwear. Body-artists transform themselves into platforms for activism, and photographers—using clothing and finery—question identity, gender, and environment. This volume celebrates a creative, effervescent generation, which—by breaking the rules and rewriting the narrative of the African continent—is inventing a new and resolutely African chapter in the history of fashion that is now resonating across the globe.

[Source: Penguin Random House]