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South to America Audiobook Summary

“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

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.

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South to America Audiobook Narrator

Imani Perry is the narrator of South to America audiobook that was written by Imani Perry

Imani Perry is the author of South to America, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction. She is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Perry’s other books include Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 Bograd-Weld Biography Prize from the Pen America Foundation; Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons.  

About the Author(s) of South to America

Imani Perry is the author of South to America

More From the Same

South to America Full Details

Narrator Imani Perry
Length 16 hours 32 minutes
Author Imani Perry
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date January 25, 2022
ISBN 9780063095304

Subjects

The publisher of the South to America is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science

Additional info

The publisher of the South to America is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780063095304.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Traci

February 24, 2022

This book is so good. Imani Perry is pulling from so many different strands and creating an incredibly compelling narrative about the power and importance of The American South. I struggled at first with the style, but once I figured out what she was doing, I fell in love with this book. It is masterful.

Raymond

August 28, 2022

"History orients us and magnifies our present circumstance." -Imani PerryThis may sound cliché but Imani Perry's book South to America is a "love letter" to and a "reckoning" with the "South". I put "South" in quotations marks because people (depending on where you live) have different opinions on what constitutes the South. As a native North Carolinian, growing up I used to think that nothing north of Virginia was considered South. In her book, Perry broadens that definition as she travels from Appalachia to the Caribbean to show that the South is more present in the places you would least expect it in and is a strong influence for the rest of country in the places that we know as the Deep South. Perry a daughter of the South, specifically Birmingham, AL travels from state to state, meeting interesting people along the way. Each chapter covers a state or region in the South, you learn alot of history and you also get to see what Imani sees as she visits these places. There are times of racial solidarity and pride, especially when she discovers how several of her Princeton colleagues' ancestors originated from the same town or when native Cubans believed she was also Cuban because "Cuba is Black". There are also moments of tension, where Imani experiences racism, subtle and malicious.Through her travels you will also learn some interesting facts that you may not have know before, such that the Kentucky Derby, at its beginning, was an integrated event before segregation kicked in or that dollar stores originated in the South, just to name a few. I was a big fan of the chapter on my home state which I assume would be the case for most readers. The chapters will probably mean more to you if you have lived or been to those places or have some familiarity with them. This would definitely be a great book to take with you when you travel to Southern regions you have not been to before. Perry closes this book on the city of Houston, Texas and says "it's just a fragment and a reminder that I have left out so many stories of the South". You get that sentiment throughout the book, she can't cover everything, even though you wish she could. But she does acknowledge the sad fact that so many stories that have been left out are because they have simply been forgotten, in many cases on purpose. For example, the many everyday places where enslaved people were sold outside of fancy auction blocks and the homes and storied landmarks of our ancestors. Meanwhile, monuments, memorials, and markers are erected all over the country for the "great" men of history, many of whom had troubled and racists pasts. Perry reflects on this by saying, "The way some histories are left untraced while monuments to other histories pile up tells you a great deal about what we call "the uses of history"."It is my hope that Imani Perry's book South to America will be one of the many books whose historical use will be to uncover hidden truths about the American South, how influential it was and continues to be to this day. And that readers, especially those native to the South will begin to mine the South and their respective family histories for more stories to be brought back into the light.

Oscreads

November 09, 2021

This book is filled with ideas that have the power to shake America. Every chapter/section is filled. I especially loved the way Dr. Imani Perry expanded their research and journey throughout the South, historically and physically, by looking beyond what American considers as the South. This is a book that is always moving. And I loved that. In their newest book, Dr. Perry opens up the South for her readers and reveals extraordinary things that will definitely keep you on your toes. This book offers a perspective that I was super captivated by. Side note: I loved what Dr. Perry did with the prose. There were instances where I felt the South enter her writing and I feel like that this did wonders for this history and Dr. Perry’s arguments. This is one to look out for.

David

January 07, 2022

Received as an ARC via my employer Barnes & Noble. Started 12-31-21; finished 1-7-22. Each chapter is about a different Southern state. Basically I learned that this country still has a long, long way to go to remove racism from its daily life, and White citizens aren't even aware of much of it. This book attempts to educate us. Read this book with an open mind and you'll be a better person when you're done.

Jamie

February 01, 2023

In this book Imani Perry looks at how the Black experience is informed by the past, from slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and up to the present. Her narrative is structured around visits to various places in the South, which for her purposes stretches from West Virginia to Cuba. For those with only a cursory knowledge of the history of Being Black in America, it will come as a shock. To maintain their privileged position, even if it was only one notch above the Blacks, some Whites were and are willing to do anything, from the soft violence of job discrimination, denial of voting rights, and Separate-but-(Never)-Equal, up to intimidation, assault, rape, and murder. And then they go to church on Sundays and no doubt think of themselves as fine Christians.Change is perceived as a threat in many parts of the South. Blacks pulling themselves up by their bootstraps is especially feared, but it is not just race that causes this reaction, “when the racial, gender, and sexual orders were threatened in the mid-twentieth century by civil rights activists and hippies, an old-time religion and ideology flowered on the terms of discontent. In 1979, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was born in Virginia. That’s not incidental.” (p. 54)There is a particularly good section on Nazis in America. Not White Trash wannabe Nazis, but the real thing. After World War II the United States offered sanctuary to many of Germany’s rocket scientists, conveniently overlooking their past. Wernher von Braun became an American hero for his work in the space program, especially as chief architect of of the Saturn V moon rocket, even though he had been a member of the Nazi party and used slave labor to build the wartime V-2 rockets. In fact, more prisoners died building the V-2s than the rockets killed during the war. I think Imani Perry does a good job putting the issue in perspective:How do we consider Nazis in Alabama? Where does their presence lie in the story of the state? Is it simply an alarming fact that they moved from one hateful, murderous order to another? Or is the better lens one of relationship? The cold political calculus of how to achieve global power included a sign that the proclaimed democratic values of the nation weren’t as deep as declared might be the most frightful and the most honest option – maybe it simply indicated that anything, absolutely anything, could be justified for empire. (p. 104)In addition to discussing the history of the places she visits, she also meets with Black artists, intellectuals, and politicians, and her conversations with them are insightful and deftly handled. She has a particular interest in music, describing it in detail and using good examples.Men and women like the ones she talked to are making a difference in people’s lives, Black, White, everyone. Progress is possible, and it is being made, but ever so slowly. In Paul Theroux’s book Deep South he describes his trips to this region, and writes that Whites are uncomfortable discussing racial issues past or present. They point to a vague and indeterminate future and say that things are getting better, and that rocking the boat would only cause trouble. Their idea of progress is glacial change across many generations, yet they resented being told there are things that could be done today to make a difference. Theroux provides an illuminating historical quote that gets to the heart of White attitudes to Black progress, as true today as when first written: “’The South gives indications of being afraid of the Negro. I do not mean physical fear,’ Frank Tannenbaum wrote ninety years ago in Darker Phases of the South. ‘It is not a matter of cowardice or bravery; it is something deeper and more fundamental. It is a fear of losing grip upon the world. It is an unconscious fear of changing status.’”One mark of a good book is that you can’t get it out of your head, and by that standard this is a very good book. I keep thinking over the issues she raises, and then wondering if the progress is going to continue or come to a halt and be rolled back. There are many conservatives who are clamoring to halt social programs which poor people, not just Blacks, depend on, and their insistence that racism is dead means they can blame the less fortunate for circumstances that were forced on them. I liked this book but there were two things in it that gave me some trouble. One is the author’s oratorical writing style, which made me wonder if she was consciously imitating the delivery of Black preachers. For instance, though she makes the good point that “Jim Crow laws were defied every time people on the darker side of the color line opened their mouths and released sound and air from the diaphragm into the ether,” everything after “color line” could be replaced by “spoke.” I guess this writing style is intentional, but there were probably some interesting conversations between her and her editor about it.There is also a strange incident in Cuba that had me shaking my head. She visits some kind of shaman and is impressed by how well he was able to describe her life even though they had never met before. Writing about it she seems close to accepting him as legitimate. She is a professor at Yale; how could she not know that professional charlatans like this stay in business only if they are good at cold-reading their marks? And yet she fell for it; I bet she reads her horoscope every day too.With those quibbles aside, this is a good book, an important one about race, progress, and resistance. To those who say we have come a long way since 1865 it is a clear reminder that we have not come not far enough, that there is so much yet to be done.

Nuha

December 23, 2021

Thank you to Ecco and Netgalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy! Available Jan 2022 Sometimes a book wanders into your life at the perfect moment. This is one of those serendipitous occasions, where I just finished teaching Protest Literature in an English course at Louisiana State University. Told in beautiful prose, Imani Perry's South to America takes us to the heartland of the American South. Intertwining personal, political, and social histories, Perry takes on a journey through the Southern States. Elegant and emotional, the narrative commands our respect. South to America asks us to consider how the South is both a place of love and anguish, history and future and leads us to a deeper understanding of it means, truly, to be a Southerner.

Jennifer

October 04, 2021

Read if you: Want a "traveling/reporting on the South" narrative that rises above recent similar titles. I usually shy away from "traveling/reporting on the South" books; however, when I learned about this one, written by a Black woman, I wanted to read it; it's a perspective not often seen in these books. This is harrowing reading at times, but also quite joyful at times. Librarians/booksellers: Definitely purchase to include a different perspective on books about the modern South. Many thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Andre

December 05, 2022

We tend to be taught history as a North-South binary. The West supposedly existed for dreamers and explorers. But for a different, truer perspective of US existence, consider the South as a point of emanation from which everything else follows. Foundational to modern-day America are African Americans. Sorry, but that’s the truth. And it’s not just the music or dance. Who toiled? Who created? Who built? Who was worked to death? Who overcame? Who migrated? Who endured southern terrorism and northern apartheid? Don’t let any politician spouting “anti-woke” nonsense or book-banning suburban moms tell you that their comfort warrants your erasure from the facts of history. Start your journey “South to America.”

Sara

January 01, 2023

Take everything you think you know about the South, its people, its history, and its culture, shake it up, and sit back. Perry skillfully examines each microcosm of the South, from West Virginia to Cuba, from Memphis to Jacksonville. The narrative is a series of stories, history, family trees, race, economics, politics, and culture, skillfully examining places and parts and people and events that create a significant part of the African diaspora and North American and Carribean culture and heritage.

Melody

February 20, 2022

South to America by Imani Perry is a journey through the American South. The author takes you on a journey with her, state by state, and explains the history of each state, the people that she encounters, and how the state is today. This was a remarkable read because it taught me of some history that I hadn't heard of before, and it reminded me of how many racial injustices have been committed in the American South and the injustices that are still being committed today. This book is very well-done and thoughtful, and I definitely recommend it as necessary reading. Thanks to NetGalley for the free digital review copy. All opinions are my own.

Andre

March 17, 2022

Imani Perry is a musician with a pen. A lyricist with page as composition, she writes as if she is singing a song and it reads so beautifully. I’m a big fan, in fact I’m moving her into rarified territory. She is the newest member of my event category. Where her books are now events, not just another book, but an event I must attend to. This one is a love letter to the “South” written as part travel diary, part memoir, with history as foundation for present. She manages to tell a story that is both personal yet not constricted. She highlights different Southern cities summarizing their particular idiosyncrasies, always with a nod to their particular histories. And the prose is always commanding and demanding that you keep reading through these pages. There are so many passages I highlighted that if I start quoting them here, this review will go on and on. Just read it! Imani Perry, you have done it again. I’m eagerly awaiting the next Imani Perry event.

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