The nonhuman object in Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘Nowhere cool’: A black feminist critique of Object-oriented Ontology

abstract

Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a child sits in a classroom in what is presumably Ghana, feeling alienated by the “familiar things that were begin chased away by the demands of the culture of our conquerors” in the literature discussed by the teacher (2002, p. 136). In the second, a Ghanaian woman travels in a plane across the United States of America (USA). She notices a plastic address tag on the baby of the woman next to her, and starts thinking of plastic as material, of oil and of how slavery makes humans into cargo. This short story therefore consists of philosophical rumination on the nature of humans’ relationship to material and literary objects. I read ‘Nowhere cool’ as part of a black feminist epistemological tradition aimed at exposing the situatedness of supposedly neutral western thought, and at emphasising the embodiment and social embeddedness of all knowledge. I argue that the story’s specific focus on the nonhuman and on extractive economies allows for it to be read as a corrective to the same universalising gestures in posthumanist considerations of the nonhuman. I bring the story into dialogue with Graham Harman’s (2018) Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) to contend that while OOO is aimed at criticising anthropocentrism, a specific human perspective (that of the western white male) is “overrepresented” (Wynter 2003) in it. This has consequences for OOO and posthumanism more generally, since it means that the new relationship to the nonhuman Harman proposes is divorced from the reality of many humans’ relationship with the nonhuman. Posthuman ontologies need to build on the insights of black feminism in order to not replicate the skewed nature and resultant inaccuracies of hegemonic theories of the past.

keywords:

• Ama Ata Aidoo
• black feminism
• epistemology
• nonhuman
• Object-oriented Ontology

Acknowledgements

In the spirit of communal feminist practice, I wish to thank the following people who helped to give shape to this article, whether through casual conversation or through feedback on drafts: Michelle Beneke, Azille Coetzee, Natalia Flores Garrido, Chantelle Gray, Motlatsi Khosi, Candess Kostopoulos and Lenka Vráblíková. All errors remain my own. Thank you also to Uhuru Phalafala for recommending I read Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.

I also wish to the thank the American Council of Learned Societies whose African Humanities Program postdoctoral fellowship and an accompanying residency at the University of Ghana afforded me the time and space to conceive of and write this article.

Notes

1 Harman (2018, p. 182) distinguishes between how philosophical and scientific knowledge function. Due to the limited scope of this article, I focus only on philosophical knowledge.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bibi Burger

BIBI BURGER (Phd) is a lecturer at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Afrikaans. She is a 2021 to 2024 Iso Lomso fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, a 2021 Short Stay Fellow at Ghent University’s Africa Platform and was a 2017/2018 American Council of Learned Socieities (ACLS) African Humanities Program postdoctoral fellow. She is the book reviews editor of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde and a founding member of the Unlaagering Collective, a group of lecturers attempting to rethink the ways in which Afrikaans literature and linguistics are taught. Her current research interests include contemporary South African literature, gender studies and ecocriticism. She frequently writes book reviews for the Afrikaans popular press. Email: [email protected].