Akua Ananse Is a “She”

Abstract

In this essay, I channel Kweku Ananse, the trickster in West African tales. Extending upon this figure, I re-gender Kweku Ananse as Akua Ananse and offer “spider stories” to make sense of my transnational identities as a West African and French woman, who is a professor in US academe. I offer a conversation between Akua Ananse, my French-speaking grandmother figure Marie, and my professional self. My spider stories subvert usual categories of knowledge and function as a form of episteme. They borrow from the genre of Indigenous folktales, which have historically been dismissed as appropriate knowledge under Western-centered worldviews.