South to America

January 1, 2021

Returning home to the South as a Black woman, Princeton professor and award-winning biographer Perry (Looking for Lorraine) sees the region as the heart and soul of America, the various attributes typically associated with it--from slavery to Jim Crow to football fanaticism--defining the country as a whole. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

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October 25, 2021
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.

November 15, 2021
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.

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December 15, 2021
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.

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