The imagined Africa of the West: a critical perspective on Western imaginations of Africa

Rune Larsen and Stig Jensen

Review of African Political Economy, 2020, vol. 47, issue 164, 324-334

Abstract: This debate piece discusses how exceptionalised images of Africa are reproduced in contemporary Western discourse and imagination, and argues that these exceptionalised depictions of Africa enable Western consciousness to escape a confrontation with its own dysfunctionalities, hereby projecting all the excremental features characterising human existence on to its African Other. This is interpreted as a way for Western subjects to alter themselves into a position of idealised and imagined advanced civilisation – thus legitimising contemporary acts of neo-colonial exploitation in Africa.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2019.1660155

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Review of African Political Economy is currently edited by Graham Harrison, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Claire Mercer, Nicolas Pons-Vignon, Aurelia Segatti and Ray Bush

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