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. For Gabay, if the predominant view of Africa is that of a constantly barbarous space to demonstrate (white) Western civilisation, how can one account for the glut of ‘Africa rising’ tropes that have dominated Western media since the economic crash of 2007–08? Imagining Africa offers a rigorously researched genealogy of African laudatory writing throughout the 20th century, tracing the way such writing serves to simply reproduce predominant forms of hegemonic white self-conceptions.

Gabay draws on previous scholarship to denote a distinction between phenotypic whiteness (itself a fluid categorisation) and Whiteness ‘as a system of privilege that has historically made some people … more likely to experience social and economic upliftment than their non-white, or non-white-enough counterparts’ (9). Crucially, Gabay makes a distinction between Whiteness-as-system and simple Eurocentrism, arguing that ‘the desire to reproduce that system universally, to think of it as superior to any other system of social and economic reproduction … which makes this process White’ (13). Drawing from whiteness scholars such as Ruth Frankenberg, Robin DiAngelo, Peggy MacIntosh and David Roediger, Gabay categorises Whiteness as ‘a dynamic social process, linked to processes of domination, rather than a purely ontological category linked to skin colour’ (17). Consequently, 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.

Imagining Africa’s unique contribution, then, is its expansion upon analysis of white, Western views of Africa that effectively explains this turn toward the ‘positive’ yet still reifying view of the continent. Ultimately, for Gabay, Western views of Africa were not simply the inverted mirror of European civilisation, they were also fantastic spaces for imagining the transference of white vitality and genius from a decaying or denigrated West. 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). Thus, 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.

Imagining Africa ambitiously traces the development of Whiteness's preoccupation with the continent's success from the close of World War I until the present day. For Gabay, if Kenyan settlers and government officials were incapable of imagining African inclusion in the project of Whiteness in the 1920s, by the 1950s they were willing to recognize ‘modern’ and moderate Africans as successful adaptations of White institutions and values following post-war self-disillusionment and the spectre of decolonisation. Gabay ably traces these intellectual paths from the bizarre condescension of the Capricorn Africa Society to the post-Cold War announcements of African vitality, ascribing these to the continued desire for Westerners to see their own Whiteness reproduced and justified by non-phenotypically white actors.

Imagining Africa is a compelling and soundly historical analysis that turns a keenly critical eye to contemporary depictions of Afropolitanism and the waves of positive but ultimately narcissistic Western depictions of a commodified continent. Gabay's archival work is sound, his theoretical interventions are solid, and while he understates the nuanced and effective contributions of earlier scholars such as Achille Mbembe, Chinua Achebe, V.Y. Mudimbe and Stuart Hall at locating Whiteness's self-obsession even in African praise, Imagining Africa offers original and necessary arguments.

Gabay begins and ends Imagining Africa with Richard Dyer's earlier plea that Whiteness ‘must be made strange’. Imagining Africa makes considerable effort towards provincialising whiteness's universal pretensions and understanding the genealogy behind our contemporary views of the continent. It is a valuable and timely contribution.