Johny Pitts Books
Johny Pitts is a British writer, photographer, and broadcaster whose work focuses on the experiences and identities of people of African descent in Europe. He is the founder of the online journal Afropean.
Known for: Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
Books by Johny Pitts
Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
Afropean: Notes From Black Europe is a striking blend of travel writing, memoir, reportage, and cultural criticism that asks a simple but neglected question: what does it mean to be both Black and European? In this deeply observant book, Johny Pitts travels from Sheffield to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Lisbon, Marseille, and Palermo, tracing lives and communities that are often absent from Europe’s official self-image. Rather than offering a neat theory of race in Europe, Pitts builds a textured portrait from conversations, street scenes, music, food, memory, and urban landscapes. The result is a vivid account of belonging, exclusion, migration, colonial afterlives, and cultural invention. The book matters because it expands Europe’s story beyond narrow national myths and shows that Black Europe is not marginal to the continent, but central to understanding it. Pitts writes with unusual authority: as a British writer, photographer, broadcaster, and founder of Afropean.com, he combines personal experience with journalistic curiosity and a sharp eye for cultural nuance. His work gives language to identities that have long existed but have too rarely been seen.
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Sheffield and the search for self
Identity often begins not in grand theory but in the awkward intimacy of home. Pitts opens from Sheffield, the English city where his own mixed heritage and cultural consciousness took shape. As someone who is both British and African American by family background, he understands that Black European...
From Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
Paris and the weight of empire
A city can celebrate liberty while quietly living on colonial amnesia. In Paris, Pitts encounters a capital whose elegance and universalist ideals are inseparable from the histories of empire that helped produce them. The city’s monuments, museums, language, and political values often project a poli...
From Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
Brussels and Europe’s hidden capital
The center of Europe can still refuse to see the people who helped make it. In Brussels, Pitts explores a city often imagined as the administrative heart of the European Union, but one whose streets also carry the deep imprint of Belgium’s brutal colonial history in the Congo. This contrast gives Br...
From Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
Amsterdam beyond tolerant self-image
Tolerance can become a flattering myth that hides unresolved power. In Amsterdam, Pitts examines a city internationally celebrated for openness, liberalism, and multicultural ease. Yet beneath this self-image lies a more uncomfortable story about Dutch colonialism, racial caricature, migration, and ...
From Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
Berlin, memory, and selective remembrance
A society may be deeply committed to remembering one trauma while neglecting another. In Berlin, Pitts enters a city intensely shaped by memorial culture, historical reckoning, and political reflection. Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust has made Berlin one of Europe’s most self-conscious ca...
From Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
Stockholm and the loneliness of invisibility
Exclusion is not always loud; sometimes it arrives as silence, politeness, and social distance. In Stockholm, Pitts explores a city associated with welfare, order, and social progress, yet he also encounters a colder form of alienation: the feeling of being present in a society that does not quite k...
From Afropean: Notes From Black Europe
About Johny Pitts
Johny Pitts is a British writer, photographer, and broadcaster whose work focuses on the experiences and identities of people of African descent in Europe. He is the founder of the online journal Afropean.com and has received recognition for his contributions to understanding Black European culture,...
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Johny Pitts is a British writer, photographer, and broadcaster whose work focuses on the experiences and identities of people of African descent in Europe. He is the founder of the online journal Afropean.com and has received recognition for his contributions to understanding Black European culture,...
Johny Pitts is a British writer, photographer, and broadcaster whose work focuses on the experiences and identities of people of African descent in Europe. He is the founder of the online journal Afropean.com and has received recognition for his contributions to understanding Black European culture, including the Jhalak Prize for his book Afropean: Notes From Black Europe.
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Johny Pitts is a British writer, photographer, and broadcaster whose work focuses on the experiences and identities of people of African descent in Europe. He is the founder of the online journal Afropean.
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