A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

South to America

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.

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 Colour Tells the Story of My People

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another colour: 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 colour 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 favourite colour 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 characterisation 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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