IMAGINING AFRICA, whiteness and the Western gaze

270pp., illus., paperback, Reprint, Cambridge, (2018) 2020

"Clive Gabay employs a wide-angled lens to focus on the ways in which Euro-American idealisations of 'Africa' - its past, present and future - have continued to underpin the white-dominated racial order over the past hundred years. This painstakingly researched book will help to jolt contemporary conceptualisations of whiteness out of the narrow confines of identity politics (in which it is so often enmired)." Vron Ware, Kingston University

"Is it possible to be optimistic about Africa? In this beautifully sculpted book, Clive Gabay argues that whiteness frames both negative and positive impressions of the continent. Via a set of empirically rich historical and contemporary investigations, Gabay comprehensively reveals the extent to which whiteness, in international relations, is a narcissism of the highest order." Robbie Shilliam, The John Hopkins University

"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

Clive Gabay is Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. In 2014, he won a British Academy Conference Award which enabled him to hold a conference at the British Academy called 'Development and its Alternatives. In 2015, he was awarded a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Leaders Fellowship.