African Europeans

Olivette Otele Ph.D., FRHistS is Distinguished Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London. Her area of research is colonial and post-colonial history and the histories of people of African descent. She has received several major research grants looking at the African diaspora and the Atlantic slave trade and has led projects working with local communities in England, Wales, Canada, and West Africa to understand how the history of the transatlantic slave trade is still impacting the population today. Otele holds a Ph.D. in History from Université Paris, La Sorbonne, France. and received an honorary doctorate in Law from Concordia University in Canada. She is a Fellow and former Vice President of the Royal Historical Society and has been a judge of the International Man Booker Prize. As well as having written numerous scholarly papers and books, Professor Otele is also a regular contributor to the press, television and radio programmes including the BBC, Sky News, Guardian, Sunday Times, Elle Magazine, Huffington Post, and The New Yorker.

This is a book I have been waiting for my whole life. It goes beyond the numerous individual black people in Europe over millennia, to show us the history of the very ideas of blackness, community and identity on the continent that has forgotten its own past. A necessary and exciting read