A Journey to Understand the Soul of a Nation

South to America

Any attempt to classify this ambitious work, which straddles genre, kicks down the fourth wall, dances with poetry, engages with literary criticism and flits from journalism to memoir to academic writing—well, that’s a fool’s errand and only undermines this insightful, ambitious and moving project…. An essential meditation on the South, its relationship to American culture—even Americanness itself…. 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

In South to America, Perry shows readers that there is no one archetype of the American South, as she considers everything from immigrant communities to the legacy of slavery to her own ancestral roots

Provocative, perspective-shifting…. Rendered in exquisite detail…. In this vibrant, revelatory book, Perry proves herself to be a radiant storyteller…like Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Nina Simone before her

Perry is deft and disciplined, her efforts to situate the beauty, oddity, and terror that mark southern life are critical and compelling. As a travel writer, she embraces detours with an eye toward discovery…. Perry asks what it means to be tied to a ‘land of big dreams and bigger lies’ when one is committed to the pursuit of a truth that bursts the nation at its seams

This history of the American South examines its subject from both personal and sociopolitical perspectives... [Perry] draws connections between the past and contemporary experience

Breathtaking…. Extraordinary…. In the realm of Southern letters it has no real antecedent. It is that fresh, that vital, that intellectually supercharged, that incandescent

[Perry] tells rich stories of place while ignoring the borders dividing disciplines and genres, weaving personal experiences with deep history, economics and cultural critique

Engrossing…. [Perry] cannily frames her investigation as a travelogue, moving from Appalachia to the Upper South to the Deep South to outliers like Florida and Cuba…. The book’s pleasures are many…. Her vignettes spark off the page…. An immersive read

“South to America marks time like Beloved did. Similarly, we will talk not solely of books about the south, but books generally as before or after South to America. I have known and loved the South for four decades and Imani Perry has shown me that there is so much more in our region’s fleshy folds to know, explore and love. It is simply the most finely crafted and rigorously conceived book about our region, and nation, I have ever read

[Perry] focuses on a place and reflects on its distinctive relationship to the region’s history of slavery and racism, drawing on her own extensive knowledge of literature, music, art, and folklore, as well as her own family history

Imani Perry is the National Book Award–winning author of South to America, as well as seven other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Perry lives between Philadelphia and Cambridge with her two sons.

Many of us think we know the American South. We 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 characterise 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, Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America shows that in order to envision a more humane future for the United States, we must shift our focus below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Imani Perry

This prismatic volume finds the National Book Award-winning Princeton professor meditating on skin color and the indigo trade, Louis Armstrong’s music and Toni Morrison’s writing, in short, lyrical chapters

An affective investigation into the many roles of blueness in Black life. . . it is full of archival gems – but it is also a lyrical [work]. . . . What unites its disparate contents is a mood, which is just as valuable as an argument. It is a contrapuntal document, musical and moving, and no less rich for its tumbling abundance

As Imani Perry illuminates in a new book that swirls and flicks like an actual marble, [blue is] inextricable from the Black race. . . . Reading Black in Blues is like putting on a pair of those special Kodak 3-D viewfinders that make objects and issues leap suddenly into focus. . . . Its chapters are tide pools: quite short, but deep and teeming. . . . It will have you looking afresh even at your corner mailbox

New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

One of those books that slips the boundaries . . . . ‘Ask the right questions,’ [Perry] insists, ‘and you’ll move toward virtue and truth.’ Words to live by, especially in a nation where a large swatch of the population seems intent on disavowing the better angels of our nature

Touching on a range of historical, artistic, musical, and literary references—from the color’s significance in Yoruba cosmology to the blue candles used in hoodoo rituals to the ‘tremor’ of the 'blue note’—Perry illuminates how the color has been variously associated with mourning, spiritual strength, and forces of freedom and oppression

Revelatory. . . .[Black in Blues] is attuned to the high, the low, and the blue notes that compose Blackness—and we would all do well to listen

It is clear from reading Imani Perry’s Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People why she is adept at chronicling the history of the Black diaspora: She weaves stories like a village griot or a grandparent sitting on the porch recalling the past. . . . From Africans dressed in blue as if it were ceremonial garb to a tiny house in Alabama and a cloth of remembrance for a loved one, black and blue are brilliant and so is Black in Blues

Vast, multifaceted and enchanting. . . . Black in Blues also gave me a renewed sense of direction, a clarity of purpose. Here it is: Hold fast to beauty. It has everything you need. It has everything we need

A meditative and healing introspection on Black history presented through a fresh and innovative lens. . . . Innovative, melancholic, and expansive, Black in Blues achieves its goal to bring Black history to life

Scholar Imani Perry is a brilliant storyteller and cultural critic. Black in Blues offers a historical analysis of Black identity through the lens of color. She examines how the color blue beautifully reflects the Black lived experience in America

In [Perry's] writing, the familiar transforms into the unfamiliar, or the supposedly quotidian gains new depth, and because she commits to the reshaping of the familiar, her work insists upon you, the reader, joining in on that commitment. This strength is at its height in Black in Blues, an exploration not necessarily of the color blue itself, but the color blue as it appears in concert and contrast with black (black people, black history, the color black). . . . Black in Blues . . . is the best Perry has ever been, for me, on a sentence level

Each impressionistic chapter carries us into a distinctive, colorful world, and together, the sections weave a cultural richness that no traditional history could achieve. While Perry is a renowned Harvard academic who grounds her explorations in scholarship, here, she feels more like our private guide for a vast cultural voyage, her voice beautifully echoing those of her muses Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. By composing a story that unifies many generations of Black history and is experienced through a single color, Perry herself becomes a master blues artist

Perry asks us to see Black people’s relationship to the color blue in its spiritual and material specialness, and though blue carries immense tragedy inside of it, neither black nor blue is wholly defined by the cruelty that links them. Like a blues song, the beauty is found when you tune into its complex frequencies on the backbeat

Ultimately, Black in Blues is an encyclopedia, an intentional threading of the composite nature of blue and Black. Through her study, Perry demonstrates that the creation, adoration, and use of blue in global Blackness isn’t accidental. It’s a strategy, a language, a point of departure for us and by us

Perry writes to harness a complex story of shifting blues, offering us an open-ended gift

[Perry] exemplifies the best of interdisciplinary analysis and storytelling, weaving together the threads of history and culture to point out common threads and trends that people may never have noticed otherwise. As a historian, she writes in a conversational tone about the atrocities that are often left out of high school textbooks. As a cultural critic, she’s insightful and artfully intentional about the details she draws readers to

Suggestion is the modus operandi of this brilliant book. The alternative – conclusions that operate as a kind of curfew on ideas – feels immeasurably worse. That’s not the case here: the blue notes and bones sing on even after closing the book

National Book Award winner Perry offers surprising revelations about the connection between the color blue and Black identity as she explores myth and literature, art and music, folklore and film. . . . An innovative cultural history

An impressionistic cultural history of the African diaspora through its connections to the color blue, from the Congo to Haiti, Jamaica, and the American South, in music, dance, folklore, art, and literature. . . . Packed with cultural references to Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Miles Davis, and Picasso’s African-inspired Blue Period, this is a fascinating and creative work of popular anthropology . . . Original and affecting

A lyrical meditation on ‘the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk.’ . . . In direct and intimate prose, Perry synthesizes an impressive range of research into a sinewy, pulsing narrative that positions the past as an active, living force in the present. Readers will be swept up

Imani Perry's work is brilliant and lyrical as ever! How clearly she assesses the history of Black and Blue, knitting them together with language both precise and haunting. This book is a great gift, in that it allowed me to see the world anew with Perry's clear-eyed insight. How Perry allows me to understand my Blue better, too!

Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend and Sing, Unburied, Sing

Black in Blues is a stunningly original journey in search of the historical origins of the very soul of African American life and culture. Along the way, Perry shows, with telling detail and in engaging prose, how ‘The Blues’ became Black, and how Black people became ‘Blues People'

With Black in Blues, Imani Perry establishes herself as the most important interpreter of Black life in our time. With intellectual skill, an artist’s eye, and the beauty of her pen, she powerfully tells the story of our people through the color blue. This is an extraordinary book

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again and We Are the Leaders

Imani Perry's Black in Blues is a masterful convergence of literature, history, and culture—where color itself becomes the field for reflection and revelation. The sheer span of Perry’s thinking, like the sweep of a great sky, stirs the most breathtaking of elusive emotions: awe

Evan Osnos, author of Wildland and Age of Ambition

How a Color Tells the Story of My People

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for a life beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, "What did I do to be so Black and blue?" In Black in Blues, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology. 
 
Drawing deeply from her own life as well as from art and history, Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as "Blue Black". The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers she plants in memory of a loved one. 
 
Attuned to both the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, Black in Blues is a poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original work from one of our greatest thinkers.

Imani Perry

Praise for Black in Blues

This prismatic volume finds the National Book Award-winning Princeton professor meditating on skin color and the indigo trade, Louis Armstrong’s music and Toni Morrison’s writing, in short, lyrical chapters

An affective investigation into the many roles of blueness in Black life. . . it is full of archival gems – but it is also a lyrical [work]. . . . What unites its disparate contents is a mood, which is just as va ...

As Imani Perry illuminates in a new book that swirls and flicks like an actual marble, [blue is] inextricable from the Black race. . . . Reading Black in Blues is like putting on a pair of those special Ko ...

This prismatic volume finds the National Book Award-winning Princeton professor meditating on skin color and the indigo trade, Louis Armstrong’s music and Toni Morrison’s writing, in short, lyrical chapters

An affective investigation into the many roles of blueness in Black life. . . it is full of archival gems – but it is also a lyrical [work]. . . . What unites its disparate contents is a mood, which is just as va ...

As Imani Perry illuminates in a new book that swirls and flicks like an actual marble, [blue is] inextricable from the Black race. . . . Reading Black in Blues is like putting on a pair of those special Ko ...

This prismatic volume finds the National Book Award-winning Princeton professor meditating on skin color and the indigo trade, Louis Armstrong’s music and Toni Morrison’s writing, in short, lyrical chapters

An affective investigation into the many roles of blueness in Black life. . . it is full of archival gems – but it is also a lyrical [work]. . . . What unites its disparate contents is a mood, which is just as va ...

As Imani Perry illuminates in a new book that swirls and flicks like an actual marble, [blue is] inextricable from the Black race. . . . Reading Black in Blues is like putting on a pair of those special Ko ...

Books by Imani Perry

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