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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
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
"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." - Tayari Jones, The New York Times Book Review
"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." - Time
"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." - Oprah Daily
"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." - Vulture
"This history of the American South examines its subject from both personal and sociopolitical perspectives... [Perry] draws connections between the past and contemporary experience." - New Yorker
"Breathtaking.... Extraordinary.... In the realm of Southern letters it has no real antecedent. It is that fresh, that vital, that intellectually supercharged, that incandescent." - Garden & Gun
"[Perry] tells rich stories of place while ignoring the borders dividing disciplines and genres, weaving personal experiences with deep history, economics and cultural critique." - Los Angeles Times
"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." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
"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." - Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"[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." - NPR's Fresh Air
"Perry has a knack for the simple observation that showcases the contradictions Americans endure or ignore." - Washington Post
"In the tradition of native daughters and sons returning home and cataloging the journey, Imani Perry undertakes an exploration of and meditation on the many Souths that make up the American southland. Part pilgrimage, part elegy and clarion call, South to America is wide-ranging, associative and seamlessly woven-an ambitious sweep of history, culture, language. Perry's intellect is capacious. Moving deftly between registers, she proves to be an insightful and compelling guide." - Natasha Trethewey, author of Memorial Drive
"Perry scrutinizes the destination, and plucks threads from its history, its culture, its personality; then she weaves them together to tell a story about the place that reflects, informs, or portends our national psyche. The result is a compelling, thought-provoking read sure to spark both consensus and debate, but ultimately it serves to illustrate just how much race impacts life in this country." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Perry's seamlessly crafted work is a tour-de-force reckoning." - Literary Hub
"Powerful.... Perry lets us hear what the voices have to tell us, so we can make up our own minds about where we are and how far we've come." - Christian Science Monitor
"[A] saturated, gorgeously written, and keenly revelatory travelogue...Perry's southern tour is intimate and encompassing, finely laced and steely, affecting and transformative."
- Booklist (starred review)
"[Perry] melds memoir, travel narrative, and history in an intimate, penetrating journey through the South.... A graceful, finely crafted examination of America's racial, cultural, and political identity. Perry always delivers." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
"A rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America." - Publishers Weekly
Praise for Breathe - ////
"Breathe is a parent's unflinching demand, born of inherited trauma and love, for her children's right simply to be possible." - New York Times
"In Breathe, Perry offers a lyrical meditation that connects a painful, proud history of African American struggle with a clarion call for present-day action to protect, defend, and celebrate the promise of the next generation." - Stacey Abrams, founder and chair of Fair Fight Action, Inc.
"Breathe: A Letter to My Sons is deeply cathartic and resonant for parents attempting to raise their children with intention and integrity. Imani Perry shows deep compassion for both parents and children while incisively underlining the realities of raising Black boys in a country that will inherently betray them. It is a book filled with love and insight for difficult times." - Tarana Burke
Praise for Looking for Lorraine - ////
"A masterly syntheses of research and analysis." - New York Times Book Review
"Looking for Lorraine is phenomenal. I didn't know how hungry I was for this intimate portrait until now. It feels as though Ms. Hansberry has walked into my living room and sat down beside me. What an honor and joy to read this. The writing is whip-smart, yet lovely and clear-eyed. What gifts this book, Ms. Perry, and Lorraine Hansberry are to the world." - Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and National Book Award Winner for Brown Girl Dreaming
"This is one of those books you need to read. Lorraine Hansberry was so dear, so gifted, so black, so singular in so many ways, that to miss the story of her life is to miss a huge part of ours. She left us way too soon, and yet the gift of her presence, so briefly among us, is still felt in the art she left behind. But not only in the art, but in the life. A life at last made comprehensible by this loving, attentive, thoughtful book." - Alice Walker
"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." - Time
"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." - Oprah Daily
"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." - Vulture
"This history of the American South examines its subject from both personal and sociopolitical perspectives... [Perry] draws connections between the past and contemporary experience." - New Yorker
"Breathtaking.... Extraordinary.... In the realm of Southern letters it has no real antecedent. It is that fresh, that vital, that intellectually supercharged, that incandescent." - Garden & Gun
"[Perry] tells rich stories of place while ignoring the borders dividing disciplines and genres, weaving personal experiences with deep history, economics and cultural critique." - Los Angeles Times
"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." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
"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." - Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"[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." - NPR's Fresh Air
"Perry has a knack for the simple observation that showcases the contradictions Americans endure or ignore." - Washington Post
"In the tradition of native daughters and sons returning home and cataloging the journey, Imani Perry undertakes an exploration of and meditation on the many Souths that make up the American southland. Part pilgrimage, part elegy and clarion call, South to America is wide-ranging, associative and seamlessly woven-an ambitious sweep of history, culture, language. Perry's intellect is capacious. Moving deftly between registers, she proves to be an insightful and compelling guide." - Natasha Trethewey, author of Memorial Drive
"Perry scrutinizes the destination, and plucks threads from its history, its culture, its personality; then she weaves them together to tell a story about the place that reflects, informs, or portends our national psyche. The result is a compelling, thought-provoking read sure to spark both consensus and debate, but ultimately it serves to illustrate just how much race impacts life in this country." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Perry's seamlessly crafted work is a tour-de-force reckoning." - Literary Hub
"Powerful.... Perry lets us hear what the voices have to tell us, so we can make up our own minds about where we are and how far we've come." - Christian Science Monitor
"[A] saturated, gorgeously written, and keenly revelatory travelogue...Perry's southern tour is intimate and encompassing, finely laced and steely, affecting and transformative."
- Booklist (starred review)
"[Perry] melds memoir, travel narrative, and history in an intimate, penetrating journey through the South.... A graceful, finely crafted examination of America's racial, cultural, and political identity. Perry always delivers." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
"A rich and imaginative tour of a crucial piece of America." - Publishers Weekly
Praise for Breathe - ////
"Breathe is a parent's unflinching demand, born of inherited trauma and love, for her children's right simply to be possible." - New York Times
"In Breathe, Perry offers a lyrical meditation that connects a painful, proud history of African American struggle with a clarion call for present-day action to protect, defend, and celebrate the promise of the next generation." - Stacey Abrams, founder and chair of Fair Fight Action, Inc.
"Breathe: A Letter to My Sons is deeply cathartic and resonant for parents attempting to raise their children with intention and integrity. Imani Perry shows deep compassion for both parents and children while incisively underlining the realities of raising Black boys in a country that will inherently betray them. It is a book filled with love and insight for difficult times." - Tarana Burke
Praise for Looking for Lorraine - ////
"A masterly syntheses of research and analysis." - New York Times Book Review
"Looking for Lorraine is phenomenal. I didn't know how hungry I was for this intimate portrait until now. It feels as though Ms. Hansberry has walked into my living room and sat down beside me. What an honor and joy to read this. The writing is whip-smart, yet lovely and clear-eyed. What gifts this book, Ms. Perry, and Lorraine Hansberry are to the world." - Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and National Book Award Winner for Brown Girl Dreaming
"This is one of those books you need to read. Lorraine Hansberry was so dear, so gifted, so black, so singular in so many ways, that to miss the story of her life is to miss a huge part of ours. She left us way too soon, and yet the gift of her presence, so briefly among us, is still felt in the art she left behind. But not only in the art, but in the life. A life at last made comprehensible by this loving, attentive, thoughtful book." - Alice Walker
Auf der Suche nach dem Herzen der Nation: Imani Perry reist durch den Süden Amerikas und macht sich Gedanken über die Lage des Landes.
Der Rassismus, die Abschaffung von Frauenrechten, die Dominanz des Christlichen Nationalismus - es gibt viele Gründe, die amerikanischen Südstaaten als rückständig zu porträtieren, als eine Art Stachel im Fleisch der amerikanischen Nation. Dagegen gehen in letzter Zeit mehrere Journalisten und Historiker an, für die der Süden nichts weniger als der Spiegel der Nation selbst ist, Ursprung und Gegenwart vieler Probleme, ja, so etwas wie das eigentliche "Heartland", wie es Imani Perry in einem Interview formulierte. Perry, Professorin für Afroamerikanistik an der Princeton-Universität, entwickelt diesen Gedanken in ihrem Buch "South to America", das kürzlich mit dem amerikanischen National Book Award ausgezeichnet wurde. Den Süden genau zu betrachten, seine Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und "seine bedrohliche Zukunft", ermögliche ein tieferes Verständnis der heutigen Lage des Landes.
Für Perry stehen die elf ehemaligen konföderierten sowie die Sklavenhalter-Grenzstaaten, wie Delaware oder Maryland, im Zentrum der amerikanischen Erzählung. Auf der Suche nach "Seele" und "Herz" der Nation komme man zu dem, was im Herzen des Südens liege: race und Rassismus im Zusammenspiel mit kapitalistischer Ausbeutung. Der Raub indigenen Landes und die Sklaverei ermöglichten die Plantagenwirtschaft, die wiederum eng verzahnt war mit der industriell geprägten Ökonomie des Nordens. Und beide begründeten eine soziale Ordnung, die bis heute nachwirke.
Perry beginnt ihre Reise dort, wo für viele Menschen der "Upper South" liegt: in Virginia, Maryland und auch in Washington, D. C. Die Orte sind untrennbar mit der Geschichte von Sklaverei, reconstruction, Jim Crow und Bürgerrechtsbewegung verbunden. "Rasse" sei dabei stets eine Fiktion, in deren Zentrum das Schwarzsein liege. Alle anderen Gruppen konnten ihr "Weißsein" schließlich in wachsender Distanz zu Schwarzen definieren - auch jene europäischen Fronarbeiter, die einst gemeinsam mit Schwarzen Aufstände wagten, zuletzt die "Bacon's Rebellion" von 1676 in Virginia. Der entsolidarisierende Effekt von Rassismus unter Lohnarbeitern funktioniert oftmals bis heute.
Perry erzählt auch von den weißen Südstaatlern und der "Intimität", die das Zusammenleben trotz der "color line" immer bedeutet habe. Damit sind nicht nur Vergewaltigung und die erzwungene Mutterschaft von Generationen versklavter Menschen gemeint. Auch andere soziale Beziehungen gab es sowie Gemeinsamkeiten in Mundart oder Esskultur. Die hohe Bedeutung der christlichen Religion etwa sei eine tief reichende Gemeinsamkeit, nur, dass der Gott der Weißen ein "Herrschergott" sei und der Gott der Schwarzen der "Gott der Sklaven", an den man sich mit Sehnsucht und Hoffnung wende: Ihr Glaube nährte Widerstand, nicht den Gehorsam gegenüber den weltlichen Autoritäten.
Einmal findet Perry sich in einem Rideshare-Taxi wieder, dessen tiefgläubige weiße Fahrerin am Ende mit ihr gemeinsam betet. In den Appalachen trifft sie auf einen jener Weißen, die sezessionistische Soldaten in Bürgerkriegs-Schauspielen darstellen. Der Mann ist ihr sympathisch, sein Dialekt ruft ein fast zärtliches Wiedererkennen hervor. Ihm genauere Fragen zu stellen unterlässt Perry; ihr Gemüt sei einer "generationenalten Erschöpfung" gefolgt.
Mit ihrem Buch folgt Perry auf Werke wie den gerade ins Deutsche übersetzten Sammelband "1619 - Eine neue Geschichte der USA" von Nikole Hannah-Jones (F.A.Z. vom 28. Januar) oder "Was wir uns erzählen" von Clint Smith. Sie selbst bezieht sich besonders auf Albert Murrays "South to a Very Old Place" von 1971. Andere Vorläufer, wie die Südstaaten-Reiseberichte von Paul Theroux oder Joan Didion, repräsentierten den Blick weißer Besucher von außerhalb - und auch das Kopfschütteln, das Perry in ein Wiedererkennen verwandeln will.
Perry selbst ist eine Wanderin zwischen den Welten: Sie wurde 1972 in Birmingham, Alabama, geboren und zog als Fünfjährige mit ihren Eltern nach Cambridge in Massachusetts. Perrys Stiefvater war ein politisch engagierter Jude aus Brooklyn, und beide Eltern brachten sie früh mit den Ideen und Protagonisten der Bürgerrechtsbewegung zusammen. Später promovierte Perry in Harvard in Geschichte und Jura, lehrte zunächst Rechtswissenschaften an der Rutgers-Universität, bevor sie begann, Bücher über die schwarze Befreiungsbewegung zu schreiben.
Man nehme gemeinhin an, dass Forscher aus "identitätspolitischen" Gründen zum Studium der afroamerikanischen Geschichte kämen, sagte Perry in einem Interview. Sie als "Wiegen-Katholikin" sei aber unter Juden, Buddhisten und Kommunisten aufgewachsen, unter Weißen und Schwarzen und zwischen einer "mittelwestlichen Ernsthaftigkeit" und "südstaatlicher Grazie". Trotz all der Vielfalt habe race das Leben aller strukturiert, und sie habe früh wissen wollen, wie und warum. Birmingham nimmt denn auch viel Raum ein in Perrys Erzählung. Sie erinnert daran, dass viele Aktivistinnen und Aktivisten ihren Kampf internationalistisch und antikapitalistisch ausrichteten - und dass auch Martin Luther King, der so oft vom liberalen Establishment vereinnahmt werde, bis zu seinem Tod an dieser Perspektive festgehalten habe.
Perrys Buch ist kein politisches in dem Sinne, dass es Lösungen für heutige Probleme vorschlüge oder sich detailliert an der Debatte um Reparationen beteiligte. Ihr gehe es um die Ehrlichkeit des Erinnerns und Betrachtens der Gegenwart. Dabei bedient sie sich einer essayistischen Palimpsest-Methode: Gründlich recherchierte Abschnitte über historische Ereignisse wechseln sich mit Reisebeobachtungen und Familiengeschichte ab. Emotionen schiebt die Autorin dabei nicht beiseite, sondern findet eine teils poetische Sprache für sie.
Um zu zeigen, dass der historische Raum des "Südens" weiter reicht als bis an die Grenzen der USA, reist sie schließlich auch auf die Bahamas und nach Kuba. Wo entflohene versklavte Menschen Zuflucht fanden und weiße Kubaner vor der Revolution ihr eigenes Apartheid-Regime gegen Schwarze pflegten, findet die Autorin nicht nur Gemeinsamkeiten mit den afrokaribischen Brüdern und Schwestern, sondern auch deren Grenzen. In erster Linie ist sie dann doch die amerikanische Touristin mit dem "imperialen Reisepass", die der anonymen Exilantin der Black-Power-Bewegung - "nicht Assata Shakur" - auf Kuba Dollars zusteckt und die Klassenschranke in Begegnungen mit Einheimischen als mindestens so mächtig erlebt wie die "color line", von deren subtiler Weiterexistenz ihr Buch erzählt. Vereinzelt bezeichneten amerikanische Rezensenten das Werk als überladen oder nicht stringent genug, auch weil Perry an manchen Orten nur kurz verweilt, über andere dagegen ausführlich berichtet. Der Eindruck der Vielfalt und Kompliziertheit der Region verstärkt sich durch die Erzählweise allerdings nur - ein angemessener Effekt. FRAUKE STEFFENS
Imani Perry: "South to America". A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.
Ecco Press, New York 2022. 432 S., geb., 29,- Euro.
Alle Rechte vorbehalten. © F.A.Z. GmbH, Frankfurt am Main