Anansi the Spider is written/adapted and illustrated by Gerald McDermott. I have found it a compelling story for young children in exploring family, cooperation,spirit animals, the moon, sky and earth, and Ashanti oral and literary storytelling and cultural traditions. Some people have raised questions about Mcdermott’s appropriation of the story of Anansi and the appropriateness, accuracy, framing and virtuosity of his retelling of an Anansi story. I believe storytelling to be central to the craft of teaching and that all teachers should be careful in the stories they choose to tell, artful in how they tell them, and respectful to their source materials while at the same time taking responsibility for telling the story to a specific audience at a specific time and place. I also think that some respect is due to Mcdermott for popularizing these stories and making them available to a wider audience. I have included some resources for making one’s own decisions.
Wiki entry for Anansi the Spider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anansi
Unsettling Fictions: Disrupting Popular Discourses and Trickster Tales in Children’s Literature: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.836.6488&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The Annotated African American Folktales, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/books/gates-tatar-book-african-american-folk-tales.html
An appreciation of Gerald Mcdermott https://www.nccil.org/artists/gerald-mcdermott
And my reading/retelling of the story