Afropean

Notes from Black Europe

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Afropean

By: Johny Pitts

Narrated by: Johny Pitts

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About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Afropean written and read by Johny Pitts.

In the face of growing racial discrimination, anti-immigrant sentiment and the spectre of terrorism looming large over an economically stricken continent, Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities: too indelibly woven into Europe to identify with Africa and yet struggling with outdated ideas of what it means to be European.

Afropean will plot an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is eighty per cent Muslim. The author 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.

Anthropology

Emigration & Immigration

Europe

Social Sciences

Africa

Social justice

Imperialism

Refugee

Thought-Provoking

Middle Ages

Soviet Union

Inspiring

Socialism

Latin American

Middle East

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Critic reviews

"forced me to stop and pause", "the book invites us to witness journeys of creativity of communities often unrecorded in studies of European history, highlighting the commonality of African-European experiences across the continent" (Olivette Otele)

Most relevant

Johny Pitts leads a thoroughly researched and meticulously constructed journey through a Europe that is utterly familiar to many, yet rarely given representational standing room in the European culture industries. That narrative of Europeaness- of great achievements, classical civilizations, misty recollections of Empires that don’t exist and a contemporary story of business minded liberalism - are in a sense utterly defunct, hurtling towards an imagined future that doesn’t exist. It is the Europe of Pitt’s journey which is the ‘real’ one, for want of a less certain word. In this Europe, the complex intersections and extractions of various kinds of colonial expansions and their aftermaths, and the impossibility of separating that story from that of the contemporary western world today, are located precisely where they belong. At the centre of the story of a continent whose cultures and societies have been utterly shaped by the events of the last 550 years. That Pitts ends his journey in the south, in an Iberia whose people and culture is also inextricably intertwined with the African continent, both through the colonialism that followed the reconquista, where a triumphant Christianity, allied with Northern European royalty, erased the memory of a place and people who perhaps embodied the original afropean society, and set in motion the wheels of the idea of Europe that would artificially separate it from its embedness in networks of complicity and exploitation around the world. This is also a story told from a working class perspective, another rarely articulated lens, and it is the warmth and generative possibilities of Johnny Pitts narration, unapologetically complex, whilst always in recognition and respect of the cooperations between people on the margins of power that makes not only survival, but also beauty and love, which may not look like mainstream idealizations of those twin aspirations for the good life, thrive. This is writing at its best. Down to earth, unpretentious, unafraid of the messiness and cracks in narratives of authenticity, deeply human and desperately needed.