Africanfuturistic Cosmovision: Tricksterism in Nnedi Okorafor’s "Remote Control"

Abstract

Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control (2021) offers a nuanced Africanfuturist narrative in which myth, magic, and technology converge to shape a speculative vision of Ghana. This paper examines the protagonist Sankofa’s journey through the theoretical lens of the technological trickster, a hybrid figure drawn from African mythological traditions and speculative technoculture. Drawing on Faucheux and Lavender III’s concept of tricknology, the analysis reads Sankofa not merely as a mythic or symbolic figure, but as a living disruption, a technological-trickster hybrid who contests the very frameworks of race, gender, and futurity. By embodying this archetype, Sankofa navigates and challenges sociocultural expectations of gender, identity, and power. The novella reimagines traditional ideals of African femininity, particularly motherhood, domesticity, and submission, by positioning a technologically empowered Black female body at the centre of narrative agency. Through this framework, the paper explores how Okorafor mobilises tricksterism not only as a mode of resistance but also as a mechanism for projecting liberatory futures for African women. Ultimately, the novella contributes to a growing corpus of Africanfuturist fiction that interrogates colonial residues and systemic inequities while offering alternative epistemologies grounded in African cosmologies.