Description
Book SynopsisAt times of Western crisis, such as the 2007–8 financial crisis, there has been a sudden growth of Afro-optimism, seemingly predicting Africa's 'rise'. Gabay examines British imperial attitudes towards Africa and shows that this phenomenon of positive coverage of Africa is neither unique, unexpected nor unpredictable.
Trade Review'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
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; 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.
