Call number
917.504 PER
Collection
Publication
Ecco (2022), 432 pages
Description
History. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML: WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration." —Isabel Wilkerson An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole. This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life. Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A Recommended Read from: The New Yorker • The New York Times • TIME • Oprah Daily • USA Today • Vulture • Essence • Esquire • W Magazine • Atlanta Journal-Constitution • PopSugar • Book Riot • Chicago Review of Books • Electric Literature • Lit Hub.… (more)
Media reviews
This is no “both sides” affair: Perry is an unabashed “movement” baby, raised by intellectual freedom-fighter parents. The conviction of this book is that race and racism are fundamental values of the South.... In other words, the South is America, and its history and influence cannot be
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dismissed as an embarrassing relative at the nation’s holiday dinner table.... it must be said that this work, though sometimes uneven, is an essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture — even Americanness itself.... underscores the refrain of this immersion in Southern (American) life and history — to what extent are we all re-enactors of the nation’s brutal history? This work — and I use the term for both Perry’s labor and its fruit — is determined to provoke a return to the other legacy of the South, the ever-urgent struggle toward freedom. Show Less
The South has been stereotyped and corralled, its vibrant complexity and profound influence due for renewed and rigorous attention. Perry...accomplishes exactly that in this saturated, gorgeously written, and keenly revelatory travelogue ... By sharing her own family history, including her
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parents’ activism, she emphasizes the essential role of southerners in the Black Power movement. Perry’s southern tour is intimate and encompassing, finely laced and steely, affecting and transformative. Show Less
Perry, professor of African American studies at Princeton, melds memoir, travel narrative, and history in an intimate, penetrating journey through the South, from the Mason-Dixon Line to Florida, West Virginia, and the Bahamas.... In progressive cities and rural towns, the author finds plenty of
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evidence of “the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride”—in short, the essence of America. The South, she notes, is “conservative in the sense of conservation. But what that means is not in fact easily described in political terms.” A graceful, finely crafted examination of America’s racial, cultural, and political identity. Perry always delivers. Show Less
Perry (Looking for Lorraine), a professor of African American studies at Princeton, interweaves personal and regional history in this impressionistic study of the American South.... Perry’s meditations range far and wide, alluding to literary theorists, basketball stars, Supreme Court rulings,
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and her own ancestors with equal familiarity and insight, though the breadth often comes at the expense of depth.... Still, this is a rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member kidzdoc
After struggling with it for nearly two months I'm finally pulling the plug on this book, which somehow won the National Book Award for Nonfiction last year. The phrase that best describes it is a "hot mess", as it consists mainly of superficial descriptions of the major regions of the South and
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well known figures, with little in the way of analysis, and Perry, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama but spent most of her life in the North, comes across as an outsider with precious little insight into her subject. The chapter on Atlanta was insultingly bad, especially since the city was my home for 24 years, and after suffering through 150 pages of this rubbish the thought of reading another 200+ pages was nauseating. This was a lazy and unfocused work unbecoming of a professor at Princeton, and it was one of the most disappointing books I've read recently. Show Less
LibraryThing member brangwinn
Perry adds to the growing list of books about the Black experience. What makes her book different than the others is her look at what “South” means to different people. Is Washington DC in the South? It depends on who you ask. She also adds personal narrative to the story and it’s the
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personal touches that make this book most unique. Yes, there is a racially divided south but there’s also a great diversity in the South. Her point that if the south was a big part of the division in the US it also might possibly become the place where America can find its belief in unity again. There’s lots to ponder even after the reader finishes the book. Show Less
LibraryThing member scottjpearson
This book took me all over the place. As a southerner, I felt a little defensive of the area where I’ve lived for most of my life. Though from Alabama, Perry’s point of view is clearly northeastern (especially when describing border states), and there’s a long history of northeasterners
And it’s easy to get down while reading this work. She covers the hard topic of race, and when in the weeds, it’s easy to construct straw men. However, I’m very sympathetic to her case. In her travels to the American South, I don’t, as a privileged white male, have to put up with the competitive mistrust of lower-class southern white folk. As much as I would like to defend the South, I consistently find myself appalled by our political representatives in Washington. According to the news, ignorance seems to be the oil that lubricates our society. Her account reflects this characteristic deeply. I yearn for a respectable white voice to side with her plight to show that our society is not irredeemably cracked, but this account leaves me basically empty-handed. Is this due to her lack of an objective method to balance her subjective tendencies? Perhaps, but I suspect it also has to do with my own willing ignorance of my fellow southern citizens.
Her writing will spurn many thoughts in any attentive reader – a trait that conveys this book’s greatest strengths. Ultimately, I’ve decided to laud and praise this book for that effect. It provokes. It prods and pokes in uncomfortable ways. It pushes the boundaries. Perhaps it overreaches a few times, but how can it achieve its intended goal without risking such? The South has been a fulcrum of American politics since Nixon’s southern strategy in the 1970s. Its unresolved contradictions have become America’s contradictions as Perry makes clear.
In the end, this book needs more balance. It needs some hope, not just incitement. It needs more beneficent figures, not just tragic figures who live despite the oppression. It needs a few instances of deep racial healing that the South has undergone. (Yes, this phenomenon exists. Look at Charleston, SC, after the tragedy at Mother Emmanuel. Look at how people hugged in the streets.) If the South is a prism to understand America as Perry contends, we need to see that goodness more in this land of hope and dreams. My experiences convince me that it’s there in the South and in America, and we need it to be amplified.
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(i.e., Yankees) stereotyping southerners. As a software developer, I found that she overlooked the “New South” almost entirely. The research triangle in North Carolina was only described as tobacco road, a remnant of slavery. Atlanta’s IBM was never mentioned. These are serious gaps, and Perry’s lack of an objective method seemed to provide easy fodder for criticism.And it’s easy to get down while reading this work. She covers the hard topic of race, and when in the weeds, it’s easy to construct straw men. However, I’m very sympathetic to her case. In her travels to the American South, I don’t, as a privileged white male, have to put up with the competitive mistrust of lower-class southern white folk. As much as I would like to defend the South, I consistently find myself appalled by our political representatives in Washington. According to the news, ignorance seems to be the oil that lubricates our society. Her account reflects this characteristic deeply. I yearn for a respectable white voice to side with her plight to show that our society is not irredeemably cracked, but this account leaves me basically empty-handed. Is this due to her lack of an objective method to balance her subjective tendencies? Perhaps, but I suspect it also has to do with my own willing ignorance of my fellow southern citizens.
Her writing will spurn many thoughts in any attentive reader – a trait that conveys this book’s greatest strengths. Ultimately, I’ve decided to laud and praise this book for that effect. It provokes. It prods and pokes in uncomfortable ways. It pushes the boundaries. Perhaps it overreaches a few times, but how can it achieve its intended goal without risking such? The South has been a fulcrum of American politics since Nixon’s southern strategy in the 1970s. Its unresolved contradictions have become America’s contradictions as Perry makes clear.
In the end, this book needs more balance. It needs some hope, not just incitement. It needs more beneficent figures, not just tragic figures who live despite the oppression. It needs a few instances of deep racial healing that the South has undergone. (Yes, this phenomenon exists. Look at Charleston, SC, after the tragedy at Mother Emmanuel. Look at how people hugged in the streets.) If the South is a prism to understand America as Perry contends, we need to see that goodness more in this land of hope and dreams. My experiences convince me that it’s there in the South and in America, and we need it to be amplified.
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LibraryThing member adaorhell
another entry in the grand tradition of scholars from the north returning to the south to try and complete their origin story. miss me.
LibraryThing member froxgirl
If you enjoyed How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith's tour of historically important sites of enslavement, you may also cherish this memoir-travelogue. Or not. Perry's is a much more personal view, reflective of her family origins and of how the cities she visits reflect the history of Black
Quotes: "We believe in amplifying the representation of those who have dominion over other souls."
"There is nothing new about ugliness in a very dressed up place. There's a lot of delight in the pomp of the American South, and if you can take the ugliness out of the equation, not just historically but conceptually, there's a lot of fun to be had."
"I owe my purpose to the fabric from whence I come. I see fit to tell stories that haven't been told, of the people who clean the toilets and the people who fill the vending machines, and what keeps them from standing alongside each other."
"The Janus face of Southern whiteness - they know what they've done wrong, and they know you know; they hate you for it, and hate themselves for it too - is strange."
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Americans, how they arrived, how they suffered, how they thrived. It's filled with loving encounters with family members, fellow academics, and just plain folks she meets. Her observation that Black and white speech in the South sounds the same, but with unique idioms, was surprising to me. This is a rich itinerary through "Affrilachia"; Harper's Ferry, WV; Charlottesville; Louisville; Annapolis; DC; Huntsville; Duke University in NC; Atlanta; Birmingham; Nashville; Memphis; Montgomery; Mobile; New Orleans; Jackson; the Georgia Sea Islands; Savannah; Charleston; Miami; Orlando; Havana, and the Bahamas. The author has a connection to all and a tale for each. This is a remarkable recounting.Quotes: "We believe in amplifying the representation of those who have dominion over other souls."
"There is nothing new about ugliness in a very dressed up place. There's a lot of delight in the pomp of the American South, and if you can take the ugliness out of the equation, not just historically but conceptually, there's a lot of fun to be had."
"I owe my purpose to the fabric from whence I come. I see fit to tell stories that haven't been told, of the people who clean the toilets and the people who fill the vending machines, and what keeps them from standing alongside each other."
"The Janus face of Southern whiteness - they know what they've done wrong, and they know you know; they hate you for it, and hate themselves for it too - is strange."
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LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce
Over the past month, I've read some real duds but also some good ones. My duds come from people who buy into Southern chauvinism. First among these is South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry. It's bad enough when white people lionize their
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southern heritage, but when black people do it, I'm befuddled. The south, the country of trump, has worked to undermine democracy since before the beginning of our government. I guess we'll see in the next few years if they really are the soul of the nation. Show Less
LibraryThing member muddyboy
A very insightful look at the American South by journeying region by region from the more northerly states the hole way south to Cuba and the Bahamas looking at a plethora of states, cities and people and how they fit into the grand puzzle of America primarily through African American eyes As a
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history teacher I learned a lot and found the author's personal family stories a wonderful addition to her narrative. This book is rightfully much acclaimed. Show Less
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Nonfiction — 2022)
Boston Globe Best Book (Nonfiction — 2022)
Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (History — 2022)
Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year (Nonfiction — 2022)
Pages
432
ISBN
0062977407 / 9780062977403