Clive Gabay. Imagining Africa: Whiteness and the Western Gaze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xi + 270 pp. List of figures. List of tables. References. Index. $105.00. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-1108473606 (original) (raw)

2022, African Studies Review

Clive Gabay's Imagining Africa: Whiteness and the Western Gaze has more to do with post-colonial studies, critical race theory, and Whiteness studies than with African studies. Gabay's concern is not the continent per se, but rather the history of idealised visions of Africa in the West, informed by the growing anxiety of Whiteness in perpetuating its mythologized genius. In his introduction (9-22), Gabay posits a distinction between "whiteness" (which defines the status of phenotypical white people) and "Whiteness" (which is seen as a system of privilege involving both white and non-white peoples in safeguarding White and Western genius). The author aims at overturning the conventional post-colonial critique of western imaginaries of Africa "by problematising the sense in which the former consistently holds the latter in inferior relation to it" (4). Western considerations of Africa, Gabay claims, changed dramatically after the 2007-08 financial crisis, with journalists, policymakers, scholars, NGOs, and international organizations describing Africa as "rising." These perceptions, according to Gabay, reveal once more the anxiety of Whiteness, which views Africa as the place where it can be redeemed. Gabay does not write a full history of whiteness/Whiteness and its relationship with Africa. As stated by the author, this is not even a "straightforward history book" (34). Gabay's strategy is rather to evoke "illustrative and provocative moments" in the history of whiteness/Whiteness in the past century, with a view to analyzing the rhizomatic genealogy of "anxiety-driven idealisation of the continent." His analysis, it must also be added, is limited to sub-Saharan Africa and, more specifically, to the "Anglosphere," that is, English-speaking Africa (especially Eastern and Southern) and its relationship with British and American individuals and institutions. Gabay divides the book into three thematical and chronological parts, which form its backbone. The first part, which consists of Chapters Two and Three, describes the 1920s, during which Whiteness and the genius of the Western civilization were exclusively associated with the condition of