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

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”