Imagining Africa

Whiteness and the Western Gaze

Clive Gabay

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781108473606
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108668880
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Imprints Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Whiteness, the Western Gaze and Africa
• 2 Finding Anti­Civilisation 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 White­Western Incorporation of Africa
• 7 Africa Rising, Whiteness Falling
• 8 Making Whiteness Strange
• References
• Index