Creating Africa: An Essay on the Power of Looking

In the global contest of looking, Africa has not been granted equal status. We stand apart as the Other, stared at, looked down upon, and most times, lacking the vantage point to return the gaze. In Rosemary Garland-Thompson’s extensive research on staring, she explains it as ‘a conduit to knowledge’, an attempt to familiarize oneself with ‘whatever or whomever embodies the unpredictable, strange, or disordered’. The power embodied in visualization is typified perfectly in the diff

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