Tricksters, Animals, New Materialities, and Indigenous Wisdoms

Abstract

Hybridity, tricksterism and shamanism/sorcery populate indigenous narratives, inform the combined oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari and make frequent appearances in Afrofuturistic sonic fiction, literary fiction and artistic production. Intruding into the Afrofuturist-inspired work of South African artists such as Mer Roberts and Asha Zero, as well as the magical realist writing of Ingrid Winterbach, the uncanny porosity of boundaries between science and magic as well as human and animal implied by these mythopoetic forms suggests, as I will contend, new ways for navigating the permeability of boundaries between the ultramodern and the traditional.