Mike Phillips
A Backpacker in the Banlieues
Johny Pitts’s otherness isn’t straightforward. The son of Richie Pitts, a notable African-American performer who arrived in Britain to join the Northern Soul movement, graduated to the West End stage and ended up making his life in Britain, Johny grew up in Sheffield’s Firth Park. As a black northerner, he expresses frustration at what he describes as the ‘Brixtonization of black Britain – that is, the reduction of the black British experience into a single, neat London-oriented narrative’.
Ironically, Pitts repeatedly refers to Britain’s north–south divide, a favourite trope of the white Left, without apparently being aware of the differences between black migrant communities in separate parts of London
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553