Imani Perry
Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African American culture and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She has published many books: May We Forever Stand, a history of the black national anthem; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and Looking For Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which won the 2019 PEN/Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her recent book, South to America, won a 2022 National Books Award. She can be found on Twitter @imaniperry.
Books by Imani Perry
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
by Imani Perry
National Book Award 2022 Winner
Imani Perry writes eloquently and with great insight into the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South.
May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem
by Imani Perry
In May We Forever Stand, I used black newspapers, which were only recently digitized, a great deal. There was a lot of material about the anthem’s presence at organizational ceremonies and debates about the use of the anthem that hadn’t been drawn from before.
Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation
by Imani Perry
I address this in my book Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation. Both the gender liberation and civil rights movements were struggles to make society more open, fair and just. But both movements tended to advantage those who were already relatively advantaged within the oppressed category. So, at times, the racial justice movement advances the advantages of elite African Americans and the feminist movements prioritizes concerns of upper-class white women. That tendency is an appropriate source of tension and conflict, in academic circles and in the political world, writ large.
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
by Imani Perry
Winner of the 2019 PEN/Bograd Weld Award for Biography
It frustrated Lorraine that figures in the theatre world looked down on ‘the social dramatist.’ She saw that all art is political, whether explicitly so or not. She didn’t subscribe to the idea that there’s something strange about artists engaging in the world that they’re trying to depict or change.
Interviews with Imani Perry
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1
Black Reconstruction in America
by W E B Du Bois -
2
Exodus: Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America
by Eddie S Glaude Jr -
3
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
by Robin D G Kelley -
4
Hands on the Freedom of the Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod, and others (eds.) -
5
Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present
by Nell Irvin Painter
African American History Books, recommended by Imani Perry
African American History Books, recommended by Imani Perry
Princeton Professor Imani Perry—a prolific scholar of African American Studies whose biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Looking For Lorraine, won the 2019 PEN Biography Prize—recommends five books she considers essential to an understanding of the history of black life in America.
