The Glossary

A spirit child who dies young and returns repeatedly to the same mother, creating a cycle of grief, return, and contested belonging in Yoruba belief and literature.

The transformation of African mythic, folkloric, religious, or spiritual ideas into new symbolic, technological, ecological, cosmic, or metaphysical forms.

Fantasy that draws its settings, spiritual systems, histories, or imaginative premises from African cultures and worldviews.

Science fiction rooted directly in Africa and African culture rather than centered on the Black American experience.

Fantasy that acknowledges the blend of existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative.

A cultural and speculative mode that asks what futures become possible when Black people, histories, technologies, and imaginations are centered.

A mode of African and Afro-diasporic narrative fiction concerned with imaginative extension, transformation, and re-worlding of African mythological inheritance.

A major ethnolinguistic group of Ghana and Ivory Coast whose oral traditions include the Anansi story cycle.

A scholar whose work helped define Afrofuturism as a critical field, including through the Afrofuturism listserv and a field-shaping special issue of Social Text.

A Nigerian writer whose strange, Yoruba-inflected fiction is central to discussions of African mythic inheritance in modern literature.

A Caribbean form of Anansi, especially prominent in Jamaican storytelling, where the spider trickster adapts to diasporic histories and languages.

The Akan term for Anansi stories, carrying the sense that tales bear the spider trickster's name and narrative ownership.

The spider trickster associated with cunning, storytelling, and the ownership of tales in Akan and diasporic traditions.

Ritual and ethical attention to ancestors as continuing presences who may guide, protect, judge, or obligate the living.

A Yoruba concept of vital force, command, and efficacy: the power by which speech, ritual, and action bring effects into being.

Anansi's wife in some tellings, often remembered as the mind behind several schemes that secure the sky god's stories.

A Nigerian writer whose fiction is often discussed in relation to spirit worlds, mythic perception, and African literary modernity.

A trickster rabbit from African American tale cycles, often discussed in relation to West African trickster traditions and diasporic adaptation.

A tradition's account of how reality is structured: worlds, beings, powers, obligations, origins, and the rules by which seen and unseen orders interact.

A foundational Yoruba novelist whose forest journeys, hunters, spirits, and moral worlds helped shape modern African fantasy lineages.

The elaboration of inherited mythic or spiritual material into fuller narrative worlds while remaining answerable to the source tradition's inner logic.

A Nigerian writer noted in the blog scan for launching new epic fantasy through Nigerian trade press.

A practice for seeking knowledge, guidance, or diagnosis through ritual systems that mediate between human life and unseen powers.

A people of Mali whose ritual, cosmological, and artistic traditions have often been discussed in studies of African mythic systems.

The belief system built around change, adaptation, and collective survival in Octavia Butler's speculative fiction.

An author and illustrator whose widely circulated retelling of the Anansi story purchase introduced many readers to the tale.

A critic and writer whose work on Black culture and futurity appears in the genealogy of Afrofuturist criticism.

A real people of northern Namibia whose cultural practices include the use of otjize, a red ochre and butterfat paste.

A major people and language group of southeastern Nigeria, with rich cosmological, ancestral, and spiritual traditions.

A critic and theorist known for influential writing on Black music, sonic fiction, technology, and Afrofuturist possibility.

A Central African cultural and historical sphere whose spiritual ideas shaped African and diasporic religious worlds.

A scholar of oral performance whose work helps frame how Anansi tales explain and legitimate the name anansesem.

A Jamaican performer and folklorist who collected and staged Anancy stories, keeping the tradition alive in performance and patois.

An East African people whose oral traditions, cattle culture, and ritual worlds form part of the wider field of African mythic inheritance.

A mode in which extraordinary or supernatural events are presented as part of ordinary reality, often without the explanatory frame of genre fantasy.

The critic who coined Afrofuturism in 1993 while asking how Black culture imagines futures after historical erasure.

A fairy or small spirit figure in the Anansi purchase tale, captured through a trick involving food, etiquette, and sticky sap.

The hornets Anansi captures as part of the price Nyame sets for the ownership of stories.

A fantasy author discussed in the blog scan for modern literary uses of Anansi as an ongoing character and inheritance figure.

A speculative fiction author whose work and terminology, including Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism, clarify African-centered speculative modes.

The Akan sky god who owns all stories until Anansi pays the impossible price required to bring them to the world.

A foundational Black speculative fiction author whose work, public memory, and influence continue to shape the field.

The python Anansi captures by persuading him to be measured against a palm branch.

A divine power or deity in Yoruba religion and related diasporic traditions, associated with specific forces, domains, and ritual relationships.

The leopard Anansi captures as part of the sky god's price for stories.

A red ochre and butterfat paste used by Himba women for protection, adornment, and a bodily relationship to land.

A writer whose Anansi collections carried Akan and Ashanti stories to generations of younger English-language readers.

An early twentieth-century collector whose records of Akan and Ashanti folktales remain part of the English-language archive of Anansi material.

A major science fiction author and critic interviewed in the essay where Afrofuturism was coined.

A group of Indigenous peoples of southern Africa whose stories, art, and cosmologies are part of the region's deep mythic record.

A fantasy author whose Yoruba-inspired work and public stance on adaptation appear in the current Afromorphism blog scan.

A scholar of Black culture and music interviewed in the early critical conversation that named Afrofuturism.

An Afro-diasporic religion with West and Central African roots, organized around relationships with spirits, ancestors, ritual service, and community.

A West African religious tradition, especially associated with the Fon and Ewe, centered on spirit powers and ritual relationships.

A Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate whose translation work helped bring Yoruba-language mythic fiction to wider readerships.

A major West African people, language, and cultural sphere whose cosmologies, orisha traditions, and literary afterlives shape much African and diasporic fantasy.

A writer whose accessible survey helped bring Afrofuturism to a wider audience in the 2010s.

A Nguni people of southern Africa whose histories, oral traditions, and spiritual worlds belong to the broader field of African mythic inheritance.