Imagining Africa
Whiteness and the Western Gaze

While challenging traditional postcolonial accounts, Gabay places racial anxiety at the heart of imaginaries of Africa and international order.

Clive Gabay (Author)

9781108461924, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 June 2020

282 pages
15 x 23 x 1.5 cm, 0.41 kg

'From black and savage Dark Continent to dynamic rising consumerist titan of the future, Africa has long occupied a special place in the Western imaginary. What Clive Gabay's boldly revisionist and impressively original text demonstrates is that the psychic interplay between maps and mapmakers has always been more complex and subtle than assumed - a dialectic reflecting the ongoing evolution of Whiteness itself from exclusionary phenotypical and eugenicist racial supremacy to putatively colourless institutional placeholder that even blacks (the right kind, of course) can now occupy.' Charles Mills, City University of New York

There has been a long history of idealism concerning the potential of economic and political developments in Africa, the latest iteration of which emerged around the time of the 2007–8 global financial crisis. Here, Clive Gabay takes a historical approach to questions concerning change and international order as these apply to Africa in Western imaginaries. Challenging traditional postcolonial accounts that see the West imagine itself as superior to Africa, he argues that the centrality of racial anxieties concerning white supremacy make Africa appear, at moments of Western crisis, as the saviour of Western ideals, specifically democracy, bureaucracy, and neoclassical economic order. Uncommonly, this book turns its lens as much inwards as outwards, interrogating how changing attitudes to Africa over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries correspond to shifting anxieties concerning whiteness, and the growing hope that Africa will be the place where the historical genius of whiteness might be saved and perpetuated.

Acknowledgements
1. Whiteness, the Western gaze and Africa
2. Finding anti-civilisation in Africa
3. Native rights in colonial Kenya: the symbolism of Harry Thuku
4. 'Exploding Africa': Of post-war modernisers and travellers
5. The Age of Capricorn: bridging the past to the present
6. Afropolitanism, and the White-Western incorporation of Africa
7. Africa rising, whiteness falling
8. Making whiteness strange
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], International relations [JPS], Political science & theory [JPA], Social theory [JHBA], Sociology [JHB], Media studies [JFD], Social & political philosophy [HPS], African history [HBJH]