Adventures in Afropea: Black Travelogues as Counter Narratives to Colonial-Ethnographic Travel Writing

On July 3, 2025, the ERC project AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE and the Institute for Postcolonial and Trnascultural Studies (INPUTS) invited doctoral candidate Jenaba Samura (ZfL Berlin) who gave a talk on “Adventures in Afropea: Black Travelogues as Counter Narratives to Colonial-Ethnograpic Travel Writing”. In her talk, she explored how contemporary Black travel narratives about Europe serve as a literary counter-narrative to ethnographic 19th century travel accounts by European writers. Using Johny Pitts “Afropean. Notes from Black Europe” (2019) and its precursor “The European Tribe” (1986) by Caryl Phillips, she  examined how these texts deconstruct the colonial “white gaze” and develop narrative strategies to reimagine Europe as a hybrid, Afropean space.