Primitivism Now, Primitivism Again: Introduction

Abstract This essay revisits critical issues in the scholarship on primitivism in the light of recent theoretical and historical developments. Particularly, it considers whether the expansion of primitivism studies to take in a range of contexts and cultures beyond the western European and North American ones with which it has so long been associated calls for new theorizations and historicizations. Along the way, it assesses why primitivism’s purview had previously been so narrow by tracing the development of scholarship associated with primitivism in modernist visual arts, and it weighs up the risks and opportunities in using the term to consider a broader spectrum of cultures and artistic media. It concludes that primitivism’s breadth reflects the magnitude of the crises that it has attempted to negate: a world facing multiple and overlapping extinction crises.