Coconuttery

Coconut is a term of insult used about a black person who is acting like a white person. Darkly brown on the outside, white on the inside.

Reading Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics makes me wonder whether being a coconut is the inevitable condition of the black academic. For all its attempt to critique Western humanism, Mbembes’s philosophy is too intimate with this canon to be able to fully abjure it. We can love even those who hate us.

Europe, which has given so much to the world and taken so much in return, often by force or ruse, is no longer the world’s center of gravity. […] As the history of Europe has been confounded over several centuries with the history of the world, and the history of the world in turn has been confounded with Europe’s own, it follows, does it not, that this archive does not belong to Europe alone?

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran, p. 188

First, the assertion that Europe is no longer the centre of the world, then, in the next paragraph, claiming ownership of the history of Europe for the world. If each paragraph is a gesture, this is a shove followed by a franctic hug – and so thought clings to what it tries to cast away. This back and forth: enough to drive one nuts.