Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut and the Dialectics of Race in South Africa: Interrogating Images of Whiteness and Blackness in Black Literature and Culture

Abstract

The public outcry against President Jacob Zuma’s labeling of black ownership of pet dogs as fundamentally “unAfrican” in 2012 and the academic debates around Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s proposal in 2011 for a 1% reparative wealth tax on whites is further evidence of the continued necessity of whiteness studies today, despite South Africa’s independence from a racist Afrikaner regime and its movement towards a nonracist society. Yet, the authority, agency, and normative value of whiteness continue to work covertly within an intellectual critique embedded in standardized interrogations of images and imaginations of race and culture. Kopano Matlwa’s popular debut novel, Coconut, is a necessary, self-reflexive commentary on the interdependent nature of racial inquiry. While critics typically read the novel as resoundingly critical of contemporary blackness, they fail to see its simultaneous evocation of the necessarily porous, performative, and continuously evolving character of race and culture generally. This paper acknowledges Matlwa’s concern with a superficial postapartheid blackness, but also argues that Coconut’s complex invocation of black culture exposes the impossibility of imaging and imagining blackness without imaging and imagining whiteness. In the continued satirical fetishization of whiteness, racial essentialism is destabilized and whiteness is positioned as an inevitable mirror on and of blackness. As such, the paper simultaneously questions the efficacy of “whiteness” studies that suggest the possibility of establishing separate and exclusive studies on race and culture.