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South to America : a journey below the Mason-Dixon to understand the soul of a nation
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2022
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Summary

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

Trade Reviews
Library Journal Review
Award-winning historian Perry (African American studies, Princeton Univ.; Looking for Lorraine) takes readers on a road trip through the South, arguing that its history is fundamental to understanding the United States as a whole. As a native Alabaman and a professor of African American studies, Perry blends stories about her own life, family, and friends with the histories, literature, and culture of 18 cities and regions in the South, mostly focusing on Black history but also touching on issues of immigration, the environment, and pop culture. She starts in the "Upper South," exploring colonial history in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC, then covers the "Solidified South" of Alabama, North Carolina, Nashville, and Memphis, and finally the "Water People" of the coasts including Savannah, Florida, New Orleans, and the Bahamas. The chapters about cities where Perry has a strong connection (e.g., Birmingham, where she spent her early childhood) are moving, but others can be hard to follow, when the hodgepodge of facts and stories don't seem to be leading to a specific point about that place. VERDICT Recommended for readers of travelogues and African American and Southern history, as long as they like a meandering style.--Kate Stewart, Arizona State Museum
Publishers Weekly Review
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. Adding depth and nuance to standard portrayals of "lost cause" narratives of white supremacy, Perry highlights moments of "resistance to the slave-based society." During a visit to Harper's Ferry, W.Va., she notes that the state, which seceded from Virginia in 1861 to remain with the Union, is "foundationally anti-slavery," and cites examples of how Appalachia has nurtured Black educational excellence, including the interracial Highlander Folk School. Elsewhere, Perry delves into North Carolina's history of racial trauma, including the 1898 white supremacist uprising in Wilmington and the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, and, in an enlightening discussion with art collector Walter Evans, considers Low Country architecture, the Muhammad Ali--Joe Frazier rivalry, and the effects of desegregation on Black cultural networks. Perry's meditations range far and wide, alluding to literary theorists, basketball stars, Supreme Court rulings, and her own ancestors with equal familiarity and insight, though the breadth often comes at the expense of depth, particularly when she is relating historical events, such as abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry. Still, this is a rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America. (Jan.)
Booklist Review
The South has been stereotyped and corralled, its vibrant complexity and profound influence due for renewed and rigorous attention. Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, accomplishes exactly that in this saturated, gorgeously written, and keenly revelatory travelogue. As she did so sensitively in Looking for Lorraine (2018), she interweaves personal experiences, innovative scholarship, and clarion analysis while also chronicling disquieting and affirming encounters in the Virginias, the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, New Orleans, Florida, her home state of Alabama, Houston, and the Caribbean, and delving into long-camouflaged aspects of each place's contentious and violent past. Her inspired inquiries illuminate the ripple effects of the founding fathers' slave-holding, diverse religious practices and the rise of the religious right and its making "a virtue of white supremacy," the urban South, resistance in the form of literature and music, Black colleges and universities, and the cruel economies of cotton, coal, tobacco, oil, moonshine, and narcotics, on to Coca-Cola and Fed Ex. Perry also takes measure of attitudes, beliefs, traditions, and harsh everyday realities rooted in racism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. By sharing her own family history, including her 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.
Kirkus Review
Travels through fraught landscapes in the American South. 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. "Paying attention to the South," she asserts, "allows us to understand much more about our nation, and about how our people, land, and commerce work in relation to one another, often cruelly, and about how our tastes and ways flow from our habits." At Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, she met a Confederate reenactor--playacting she derides. Yet she found him endearing, empathizing with his yearning "to live inside history, to know its nooks and crannies, to imagine the everyday." A native Alabaman, Perry is the daughter of civil rights activists, a White Jewish father who left the North to teach at a historically Black college and a Black mother whose family had migrated to Birmingham. Although the author has lived in Cambridge, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, to her, home is "deep" within the "red earth" of Alabama. She reflects on her own experiences of racism as a biracial woman and explores ways that Blacks have adapted historically, and she engagingly chronicles her visits to communities that embody the term "broken oasis," efforts of Black Americans to embrace the nation's politics and culture while remaining independent. They were destroyed, she notes, "by the habits of White Supremacy." In progressive cities and rural towns, the author finds plenty of 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
A Note from the Authorp. xi
Introductionp. xiii
IOrigin Stories
An Errand into Wilderness: Appalachiap. 3
Mother Country: Virginiap. 33
Animated Roulette: Louisvillep. 53
Mary's Land: Annapolis and the Cavesp. 63
Ironic Capital: Washington, DCp. 83
IIThe Solidified South
The Clearing: Upper Alabamap. 101
Tobacco Road in the Bible Belt: North Carolinap. 119
King of the South: Atlantap. 141
More than a Memorial: Birminghamp. 153
Pearls Before Swine: Princeton to Nashvillep. 179
When Beale Street Talks: Memphisp. 199
Soul of the South: The Black Beltp. 213
IIIWater People
Home of the Flying Africans: The Low Countryp. 253
Pistoles and Flamboyán: Floridap. 279
Immobile Women: Mobilep. 307
Magnolia Graves and Easter Lilies: New Orleansp. 321
Paraíso: The Bahamas and Havanap. 347
Conclusionp. 375
Acknowledgmentsp. 385
Indexp. 387
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