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.