REVIEWS: Imagining Africa: Whiteness and the Western Gaze by Clive Gabay,. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 270, $85.40 (hbk)

Clive Gabay treads upon well-worn ground in analysing Euro-American attitudes toward Africa as a process of Western self-making, but his analysis offers a fresh and important historical turn as a means of understanding the role of ‘Africa’ in the construction of Whiteness as a system of racially invisibilised practices. [...]Whiteness operates precisely through its pretensions to universalist categories that render its phenotypic assumptions invisible, and potentially even transferrable to those outside phenotype, albeit rarely. Far from being begrudging acceptances of African genius or agency, Western views of Africa's emergence or vitality function as a means of recognising only aspects that align with core principles of Whiteness (and the legacy of colonial domination). [...]praise for African success at democratic governance, capitalist growth, or cultural vitality is, at its core, a narcissistic attempt to sooth anxieties about the continued success of the project of Whiteness, projected onto African bodies.