Afropean – notes from Black Europe [Book Launch – June 8th 2019]
First things first: a few words about the book.
Naturally we *love* it, but don’t take our word for it, take a look at what the critics have had to say:
Afropean seizes the blur of contradictions that have obscured Europe’s relationship with blackness and paints it into something new, confident and lyrical.
This book is a revelation: a humane, empathetic, urgent and truly eye-opening journey through lives and voices that are so often overlooked and unheard. Johnny Pitts brings us Europe on its own terms.
In Afropean, Johny Pitts has not only written a well-researched and very timely book. He’s done so while cohering and curating a community of writers, thinkers and artists from withing Europe’s black diaspora to give voice and form to this inchoate, hybrid identity
Fascinating, urgent and stirring. His humility and honesty are wonderfully refreshing and by the end of the book our perception of the old continent has been challenged and reimagined
BOOK OF THE WEEK: “this is an important book and I have no doubt Pitts will soon become an important writer”
Remi Adekoya (The evening standard)
Johny Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story
Emmanuel Iduma (Africa Writes)
BOOK OF THE WEEK: “Afropean announces the arrival of an impassioned author able to deftly navigate and illuminate a black world that for many would otherwise have remained unseen”.
Now onto the details of the launch party, starting with the portrait photographs – taken by Jonathon Oppong-Wiafe
Next >> Food from Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen and Les Nubians first ever live performance in London.
I read the book, and as an American of African descent, this book has opened up a new world of racism I didn’t know existed. Black Pete and TinTin must be abolished the way Little Black Sambo in USA was banned.