Between Cosmology and Technology: Nonhuman Near-Omniscience as Animist Practice in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article develops the term nonhuman near-omniscience to examine the narrative dynamics behind narrators who know almost everything and whose super-human knowledge draws on African cosmologies. Noting the prevalence of such narration in African sf, the article takes Nnedi Okorafor's novel Lagoon (2014) as an example of nonhuman near-omniscience, focusing on the role of the storytelling spider Udide Okwanka as the novel's metanarrator. It traces Udide's use of uncertainty, paradox, and metafictional slippages, while also noting parallels between Udide's trickster qualities and technology in the novel—both human-made and alien—that likewise generate super-human registers of knowledge. As a rejection of the binaries of cosmology/technology, human/nonhuman, and realist/nonrealist, the article considers nonhuman near-omniscience as a practice of relationality, based on Harry Garuba's framework of "animist materialism" and scholarship on animism as a relational epistemology from divergent Indigenous contexts. The paper makes two overarching claims: one, that nonhuman near-omniscience draws on the conception of deities in animist traditions that are typically characterized by relationality, rather than the absolute power commonly associated with the omniscient narrator in Abrahamic traditions; and two, that nonhuman near-omniscience is a metafictional practice that is pertinent not only to our understanding of contemporary African literary genres, but to larger questions of knowledge production in the twenty-first century.