‘Postcolonial Tricksters: African Diasporic Folklore in Contemporary Culture’ in The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures. Jones, Chista & Schwabe, Claudia (eds.)

This chapter will examine contemporary manifestations of African-rooted trickster tales, focusing primarily on the African-rooted tricksters, Anansi and Brer Rabbit. It will explore how these African diasporic trickster folktales have been adapted to contemporary culture using two key examples; the adaptation of the Neil Gaiman’s[1] novel American Gods (2001) into a popular Netflix series (2017-2021) and Beatrix Potter’s versions of the Brer Rabbit folktales, both of which have sparked controversy. It asks if the messages of resistance and survival embedded in the “original” folktales have survived and explores what these problematic adaptations tell us about the role of the African diasporic trickster in the contemporary world.