Abstract
The idea of non-human objects speaking has an illustrious pedigree. Using Holbraad’s (2011) question ‘can the thing speak?’ as a springboard, the author asks what it means to say that tobacco might speak. Accepting a degree of ventriloquism in giving a voice to plants, he tracks examples of tobacco (and its paraphernalia) speaking in English literary sources, demonstrating that the postmodern turn to ‘material agency’ and object sentiency, voice and intentionality is, in fact, nothing new. Taking Miller and Latour’s conceptions of hybridity in human/non-human relationships seriously, he argues further that tobacco can speak, or remain silent, through a number of different human and corporate locutors. Where tobacco speaks in its own words, its voice – in contrast to the ‘tinny but usable’ voice of a mushroom spore – becomes that of an imperious autocrat intent on world domination.
Highlights
Recent developments in the social sciences and humanities such as actor-network-theory and the various other branches of what can loosely be termed ‘material studies’ or ‘object-oriented ontologies’ claim to offer new ways of considering human/non-human relations
There are no examples of tobacco or its paraphernalia speaking in the comprehensive list of 284 English ‘object narrative’ novels published between 1700 and 1900 (Bellamy, 2007[1998]), a somewhat strange omission for an assemblage so profoundly entangled in human life and thought during this time
We have looked at key examples of tobacco speaking from the earliest literature in English to the present day
Summary
Recent developments in the social sciences and humanities such as actor-network-theory and the various other branches of what can loosely be termed ‘material studies’ or ‘object-oriented ontologies’ claim to offer new ways of considering human/non-human relations. The focus of this article is the different relationships between humans, tobacco and its associated paraphernalia (e.g. pipes, cigars and cigarettes).
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