Johny Pitts Archive

That the stares of hostility were motivated as much by envy as by racial antagonism did little to ease my discomfort.
Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe

Exploring Black Europe via travel, Black British journalist and photographer Johny Pitts (*1987) and his “mentor” Caryl Phillips (*1958) push the margins of how “Europeanness” can be defined.[1] As both come from a working-class background and grew up in the British countryside, there are many similarities not only in their biographies but also in their works, especially in their engagement with Europe, which they feel “both of and not of.”[2] In Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2019), Pitts mentions the book’s connection to Phillips’ earlier travelogue The European Tribe (1987). He describes it as “one of the few direct precursors to this book” and praises it for being both “quietly subversive” and a normalization of the Black gaze (116–117). Pondering the question of who and what defines Europe/Europeanness, both Phillips and Pitts passed through Berlin on their travels around Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. „Jenaba Samura: WALKING THE LINE / CROSSING BORDERS: CARYL PHILLIPS’ EVENING STROLL THROUGH EAST BERLIN“ weiterlesen

Why couldn’t these ghosts make themselves useful for once?
Bernardine Evaristo, Soul Tourists

The pivotal role of Alexander Pushkin in the Soviet state-sponsored literary project cannot be overstated: He served as the “model poet” not only for Russia but also for all other Soviet republics that were supposed to develop “their own Pushkin,” as Maxim Gorky suggested in his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.[1] Pushkin’s role as the nation’s primary poet had been firmly established since the Pushkin Jubilee in 1880. In the imperial literary discourse, the religious ideal of the “poet-prophet” was largely modeled on him. In the Soviet remodeling of Pushkin, this image merged with the Socialist Realist ideal of the writer as an “engineer of the human soul.”[2] Pushkin served not only as a national poet but also as a cultural, i.e., secular saint.[3] Consequently, Soviet Pushkin studies allowed little room for thought that seemed sacrilegious or iconoclastic. Thus, despite the significant socio-cultural changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union, contemporary Pushkin research continues to grapple with persistent lacunae in the history of his reception. „Fanny Helena Wehner: ALEXANDER PUSHKIN, AFROPEAN POET“ weiterlesen