Nnedi Okorafor's "Spider the Artist" as a Postcolonial Call for Recreating Africanfuturist Reality Through Music and De-Realization

This paper examines Nnedi Okorafor’s "Spider the Artist" by centering the transformative power of music as the mediating force between human subjectivity and postcolonial automation. Drawing from Africanfuturism, postcolonial theory, and the aesthetics of irrealism, this analysis interprets Eme's sonic practice as a mode of relational resistance within a necropolitical landscape shaped by oil extraction, gendered violence, and techno-colonial control. Accordingly, this paper argues that Eme's music functions as a decolonial technology, a technique of freedom capable of disrupting programmed violence and activating affective, non-linear memory. Through her encounter with EA, a zombified patrol unit who responds to her guitar playing, the story stages a moment of reciprocal recognition: Eme reclaims emotional agency, while EA undergoes an ontological shift. Drawing on Ashleigh Harris’s concept of irrealism, the story is framed as a response to Africa’s “de-realization” under global capitalism, in which life and value are suspended in abstraction. Within this speculative terrain, Okorafor's narrative imagines music as a culturally embedded, Africanfuturist force which bridges affect, memory, and transformation. The zombie in “Spider the Artist” becomes a resonant figure of potentiality, and it is through Eme, her grief, her music, her desire that the speculative horizon of freedom is made audible.