Jamie Stoker
The kick-off event with the twentieth Friedrich Dürrenmatt Visiting Professor, British Author Johny Pitts. In the form of a short presentation and a discussion, Pitts will talk about his work on ‘Afropean’ and the ‘B-Side’.
Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity ... I travelled through Paris and Brussels, Amsterdam and Bern, Stockholm, Moscow, Rome, Marseille and Lisbon, and found a continent of Algerian markets, Surinamese shamans, German Reggae and North African architecture, a B-side of the continent often not mentioned in travel guides and tourist brochures. Yes, all this was part of Europe too ... With my brown skin and my British passport - still a ticket into mainland Europe at the time of writing - I set out in search of the Afropeans, on a cold October morning. – Johny Pitts
