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, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, 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.
Professor Perry will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2022-23 Golo Mann Lecture; her Athenaeum presentation is also supported by CMC's Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.
Photo credit: Sameer Khan
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jazz Studies.
She is the author of six books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry and Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019) which was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Perry is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, and an author of creative nonfiction. Her writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political, and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.
She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from Yale College in Literature and American Studies.
Professor Perry will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2022-23 Golo Mann Lecture; her Athenaeum presentation is also supported by CMC's Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.
Photo credit: Sameer Khan
