South to America
by Imani Perry
Summary
South to America is Imani Perry's journey through the American South conducted on a thesis: that the South is not the nation's exception, the backward region the rest of the country points to, but its origin and its explanation, the place where American wealth, politics, culture, and cruelty were first assembled, so that, in her phrase, to understand America you must go south. Perry, born in Birmingham and raised partly in the North, a professor of African American studies then at Princeton, structures the book as travel: Appalachia and Louisville, Richmond and the Virginia plantations, Atlanta's Black wealth, the Carolinas' Lowcountry, her own Alabama, New Orleans, the Florida of theme parks and Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville, even the Bahamas and Havana as the South's saltwater edges. In each place she layers the modes the book is famous for braiding, history, literary criticism, reportage, and memoir, so a chapter can move from Shields Green, who joined John Brown's raid, to the Wilmington massacre of 1898, to a conversation with an Airbnb host, to her grandmother's kitchen, and make the movements feel necessary. The through line is Black southern life as the culture's deep source, its food, music, worship, and political imagination, held against the ledger of what was done there. Tayari Jones called it an essential meditation on the South, and the judges of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction agreed. It stands in the lineage of Du Bois's and Albert Murray's South, written for a country still deciding what its origin means.
Historical Context & Significance
The book appeared in early 2022, as the post 2020 argument over American history, the 1619 debates, the monument removals, the curriculum laws, concentrated exactly on the ground Perry was walking, and its claim that the South is the nation's key rather than its shame entered that argument from an unexpected angle. The 2022 National Book Award confirmed Perry, already celebrated for her Lorraine Hansberry biography, as one of the era's essential interpreters of American culture; her later history of the color blue, Black in Blues, continued the method. The book now anchors the modern shelf of Southern reconsiderations, the volume reading groups now reach for when they want the region argued whole, from the inside, rather than explained away.