CANR
WORK TITLE: BREATHE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Princeton
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 5, 1972, in Birmingham, AL; children: Freeman Diallo Perry Rabb, Issa Garner Rabb.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 1994; Georgetown University, L.L.M.; Harvard Law School, J.D., 2000; Harvard University, D.Phil., 2000.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, professor, 2002-06; University of Pennsylvania Law School, Philadelphia, visiting professor, 2005; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor, 2009—, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies. Has also taught at Columbia University and Georgetown University.
AWARDS:New Professor of the Year award, Rutgers University. Fellowships from organizations, including Princeton University Center for African American Studies, Rutgers University Board of Trustees,
WRITINGS
Author of introduction and notes for Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth, Barnes and Noble Classics; author of introduction for Debating Race, by Michael Eric Dyson, Basic Civitas Books, 2007. Contributor to publications, including Berkeley Journal of African American Law and Policy, Law, Culture, and Humanities, National Black Law Journal, Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, and Law and History Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Imani Perry is a writer and educator. She has served as a professor at Rutgers University, a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She has contributed articles to academic publications and has published works of nonfiction.
More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States was released in 2011. In this volume, she describes and analyzes types of discrimination and racism throughout the history of the country. Writing in Choice, M. Christian commented: “The book will provide plenty of discussion points in undergraduate and graduate classrooms.”
The song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” composed by J. Rosamond Johnson with words by his brother James Weldon Johnson, is the subject of Perry’s May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. She discusses the song’s significance in black history. T.F. DeFrantz, reviewer in Choice, categorized the volume as “recommended.”
Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation finds Perry discussing domination and the patriarchy. In an interview with Nawal Arjini, contributor to the Nation website, Perry discussed the motivations behind the volume. She stated: “I wanted to produce a work of feminist theory, or as I call it, liberation feminism, that would speak to the particular conditions of neoliberal capitalism and the hypermedia age—this eruption of digital media, where things that look like democratic spaces are at the same time corporate platforms.” Perry continued: “I saw so many uses of the term ‘patriarchy’ that didn’t actually apprehend the structure of domination. Patriarchy is a project that coincided with the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest. It’s not just attitudes. It’s legal relations between human beings, which lead to very different encounters with violence and suffering.” Perry added: “The book begins with where patriarchy comes from, and then morphs into the current landscape, in which conditions are different but where that foundational structure is still present. Feminism is ultimately a way of reading the world with an eye towards reducing or eliminating unjust forms of domination, violence, and exploitation.”
Katelan Dunn, critic on the LSE Review of Books website, commented: “Perry presents a feminist reading praxis that examines history, theory and academic scholarship to provide the basis for understanding how patriarchy informs our individual and collective selves. This book should be on the shelf of any graduate student working in the fields of feminist scholarship and critical race theory. Ultimately, while there is much work to do to dismantle ‘the patriarchy’, Perry’s literary contribution helps set the stage for interrogating its workings and reimagining what liberation could look like.”
Perry chronicles the life of the author of the celebrated play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” in Looking for Lorraine: The Radian and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. She comments on Hansberry’s significance in literary history and discusses her sexuality and political beliefs.
Referring to Hansberry, Booklist writer Candace Smith suggested: “Although she died young, at thirty-four, her brilliant intellect and talent are captured in this thoughtful biography.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked: “Perry infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm. … Impressively, she tells her subject’s story in a tightly packed 200 pages.” Martha E. Stone, critic in the Gay & Lesbian Review, commented: “Compressing her life, one in which her charisma, personal warmth, intellectual confidence, hard-hitting and often unpopular political and racial justice stances were much in evidence, must have been no easy task for Imani Perry, professor of African-American studies at Princeton. Looking for Lorraine is a deeply felt biography.” In UWIRE Text, Malachy Dempsey asserted: “Looking for Lorraine is not a complete rendering of Hansberry’s life, but it is a full and holistic one. After finishing the piles of papers and assignments for the fall semester, students should pick up Perry’s book; at less than 250 pages, it may provide a much-needed palate cleanser after months of academia.” Writing on the Medium website, Joshunda Sanders described the book as a “beautiful and quietly urgent biography.” Sanders added: “It is a magnificent tribute to an eloquently compassionate scholar following the dual guides of head and heart to Lorraine’s resting place for completion of this part of the journey. Along with seeing more into the soul of one of America’s visionary theatrical and radical lights, Looking for Lorraine is also a love note. A soul serenade.” “In fitting herself into Hansberry’s story with autobiographical elements, Perry offers a bracing air of familiarity and urgency around the artist,” noted Brandon Tensley on the Slate website.
In Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Perry discusses black history, the black experience, and her personal history. She also encouraged her sons to make good choices in their relationships with other and with themselves.
A Kirkus Reviews critic described Breathe as “a masterfully poetic and intimate work that anchors mothering within the long-standing tradition of black resistance and resourcefulness.” Sean Chambers, reviewer in Booklist, commented: “This mother’s striking and generous admonition to thrive even in the face of white mendacity also is a meditation on parenting.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2018, Candace Smith, review of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, p. 62; June 1, 2019, Sean Chambers, review of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, p. 8.
Choice, November, 2011, M. Christian, review of More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, p. 606; December, 2018, T.F. DeFrantz, review of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, p. 473.
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, 2018, Martha E. Gay, “The Revolution Will Be Dramatized,” review of Looking for Lorraine, p. 36.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2018, review of Looking for Lorraine; July 1, 2019, review of Breathe.
UWIRE Text, Nov. 29, 2018, Malachy Dempsey, review of Looking for Lorraine, p. 1.
ONLINE
LSE Review of Books, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (February 8, 2019), Katelan Dunn, review of Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation.
Medium, https://medium.com/ (October 31, 2018), Joshunda Sanders, review of Looking For Lorraine.
Nation Online, https://www.thenation.com/ (May 29, 2019), Nawal Arjini, author interview.
Princeton University, Program in Law and Public Affairs, https://lapa.princeton.edu/ (August 15, 2019), author faculty profile.
Slate, https://slate.com/ (September 17, 2018), Brandon Tensley, review of Looking For Lorraine.
Imani Perry
Professor, Center for African American Studies
Affiliated Faculty
001 Stanhope Hall
Curriculum Vitae
Website
iperry@princeton.edu
Professor Perry is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies race and African American culture using the tools provided by various disciplines including: law, literary and cultural studies, music, and the social sciences. She has published numerous articles in the areas of law, cultural studies, and African American studies, many of which are available for download at: imaniperry.typepad.com. She also wrote the notes and introduction to the Barnes and Nobles Classics edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Professor Perry teaches interdisciplinary courses that train students to use multiple methodologies to investigate African American experience and culture.
Publications:
selected publications:
(in copy-editing) More Terrible, More Beautiful: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: NYU Press, 2010)
“Tell Us How it Feels to be a Problem: Hip Hop Longings and Poor Young Black Men” in Against the Wall: Poor Young, Black and Male ed. Elijah Anderson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)
“It Ain’t Hard to Tell: A Story of Lyrical Transcendence” in Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’ Illmatic eds. Michael Eric Dyson, Sohail Dalautzai Basic Books, December 2009
“Do You Really Love New York?: Contemporary Intersections of Race, Television and Social Policy” The Berkeley Journal of African American Law and Policy, expected February 2008
“Black Arts and Good Law: Literary Arguments for Racial Justice in the Time of Plessy”
Law, Culture and Humanities (peer reviewed) 2008.
Book Review
The Brown Decision, Jim Crow and Southern Identity
By James C. Cobb (The University of Georgia Press, 2005)
25 Law and History Review, 679. Fall 2007.
“There Goes the Neighborhood”
02138 Magazine, Spring 2007
“The Practice of Racial Inequality in Post-Intent Times”
National Black Law Journal, Columbia Law School, 2007.
“Let Me Holler at You: African American Culture, Postmodern Feminism and Revisiting Sexual Harassment Law”
Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, 2007.
Introduction
Debating Race with Michael Eric Dyson by Michael Eric Dyson, Basic Civitas Books, 2007.
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (book)
Duke University Press, 12/2004
Introduction and Notes
Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth
Barnes and Nobles Classics 8/2005.
“Occupying the Universal, Embodying the Subject: African American Literary Jurisprudence” (peer reviewed)
Law and Literature Volume 17, Issue 1, 2005 (97-129).
“Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory and Some Reflections on Methods”
Lat Crit IX Symposium “Countering Kulturkampf Through Critique and Justice Pedagogy” 50 Villanova Law Review 2005 (915-923).
“Dismantling The House of Plessy:
A Private Law Study of Race in Cultural and Legal History with Contemporary Resonances” (peer reviewed)
Studies in Law Politics and Society Volume 33, 2004 (91-159).
eds. Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick
“Holistic Integration: An Anniversary Reflection on the Goals of Brown v. Board of Education” in Legacies of Brown: Multiracial Equity in American Education eds. Dorinda J. Carter, Stella M. Flores & Richard J. Reddick Harvard School of Education Review Press, 2004 (303-313).
“Buying White Beauty”
Cardozo Journal of Gender and Law
12 Cardozo J.L. & Gender 2006 (579-607).
“Of Desi, J.LO and Color Matters: Law, Critical Race Theory, The Architecture of Race”
Lat Crit VIII Symposium “City and the Citizen: Operations of Power, Strategies of Resistance”
52 Cleveland State Law Review 2004 (139-152).
Book Review Essay
“Crimes Without Punishment: White Neighbors’ Resistance to Black Entry” Steven Grant Meyer As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
second author, co-authored with Leonard S. Rubinowitz
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
Northwestern University Volume 92, No. 2 (335-428).
“Who(se) am I? The Identity and Image of Women in Hip Hop” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader 2nd edition
ed. Gail Dines and Jean Humez
Sage Publications, 2003 (136-148).
“Toasts, Jam and Libation: How We Place Malcolm in the Folk Tradition” in Teaching Malcolm X ed. Theresa Perry
Routledge Press, 1996 (171-186).
“It’s My Thang and I’ll Swing it The Way That I Feel: Sexuality and Black Women Rappers” Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader 1st Edition ed. Gail Dines and Jean Humez Sage Publications, 1994 (524-530).
Imani Perry
Professor
Center for African American Studies
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
08544
Education
Doctor of Philosophy, June 2000
Program in the History of American Civilization
Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Dissertation: “Dusky Justice: Race in U.S. Law and Literature 1878-1914”
Major Fields: American Literature, American Studies
Juris Doctor, June 2000
Harvard Law School
Bachelor of Arts, June 1994
Yale College
Relevant Work Experience
Professor
Center for African American Studies
Princeton University
7/2009-present
Professor
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
School of Law, Camden
6/2002-6/2009
Distinctions:
Inaugural Distinguished Visiting Fellow
,Princeton University Center for African American Studies, 2007-2008
Rutgers University Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence (awarded annually to Rutgers faculty with most distinguished tenure packages Spring 2007, also I was promoted two steps from associate without tenure to full professor)
Visiting Professor of Law University of Pennsylvania Law School, Fall 2005
Selected Publications:
(in copy-editing) More Terrible, More Beautiful: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: NYU Press, 2010)
“Tell Us How it Feels to be a Problem: Hip Hop Longings and Poor Young Black Men” in Against the Wall: Poor Young, Black and Male ed. Elijah Anderson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)
“It Ain’t Hard to Tell: A Story of Lyrical Transcendence” in Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’ Illmatic eds. Michael Eric Dyson, Sohail Dalautzai Basic Books, December 2009
“Do You Really Love New York?: Contemporary Intersections of Race, Television and Social Policy” The Berkeley Journal of African American Law and Policy, expected February 2008
“Black Arts and Good Law: Literary Arguments for Racial Justice in the Time of Plessy”
Law, Culture and Humanities (peer reviewed) 2008.
Book Review
The Brown Decision, Jim Crow and Southern Identity
By James C. Cobb (The University of Georgia Press, 2005)
25 Law and History Review, 679. Fall 2007.
“There Goes the Neighborhood”
02138 Magazine, Spring 2007
“The Practice of Racial Inequality in Post-Intent Times”
National Black Law Journal, Columbia Law School, 2007.
“Let Me Holler at You: African American Culture, Postmodern Feminism and Revisiting Sexual Harassment Law”
Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, 2007.
Introduction
Debating Race with Michael Eric Dyson by Michael Eric Dyson, Basic Civitas Books, 2007.
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (book)
Duke University Press, 12/2004
Introduction and Notes
Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth
Barnes and Nobles Classics 8/2005.
“Occupying the Universal, Embodying the Subject: African American Literary Jurisprudence” (peer reviewed)
Law and Literature Volume 17, Issue 1, 2005 (97-129).
“Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory and Some Reflections on Methods”
Lat Crit IX Symposium “Countering Kulturkampf Through Critique and Justice Pedagogy” 50 Villanova Law Review 2005 (915-923).
“Dismantling The House of Plessy:
A Private Law Study of Race in Cultural and Legal History with Contemporary Resonances” (peer reviewed)
Studies in Law Politics and Society Volume 33, 2004 (91-159).
eds. Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick
“Holistic Integration: An Anniversary Reflection on the Goals of Brown v. Board of Education” in Legacies of Brown: Multiracial Equity in American Education eds. Dorinda J. Carter, Stella M. Flores & Richard J. Reddick Harvard School of Education Review Press, 2004 (303-313).
“Buying White Beauty”
Cardozo Journal of Gender and Law
12 Cardozo J.L. & Gender 2006 (579-607).
“Of Desi, J.LO and Color Matters: Law, Critical Race Theory, The Architecture of Race”
Lat Crit VIII Symposium “City and the Citizen: Operations of Power, Strategies of Resistance”
52 Cleveland State Law Review 2004 (139-152).
Book Review Essay
“Crimes Without Punishment: White Neighbors’ Resistance to Black Entry” Steven Grant Meyer As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
second author, co-authored with Leonard S. Rubinowitz
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
Northwestern University Volume 92, No. 2 (335-428).
“Who(se) am I? The Identity and Image of Women in Hip Hop” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader 2nd edition
ed. Gail Dines and Jean Humez
Sage Publications, 2003 (136-148).
“Toasts, Jam and Libation: How We Place Malcolm in the Folk Tradition” in Teaching Malcolm X ed. Theresa Perry
Routledge Press, 1996 (171-186).
“It’s My Thang and I’ll Swing it The Way That I Feel: Sexuality and Black Women Rappers” Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader 1st Edition ed. Gail Dines and Jean Humez Sage Publications, 1994 (524-530).
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she is also affiliated with the Programs in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Law and Public Affairs. Perry is the author of five books and numerous scholarly articles. Her fields of inquiry include legal history, cultural studies, literary studies, and music. She holds a PhD from Harvard in American Studies, a JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center, and a BA from Yale College. She is also a creative nonfiction essayist and a book reviewer. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, Perry spent most of her childhood in Massachusetts, as well as time in Chicago. Perry currently lives in the Philadelphia area with her two sons.
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, and in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and spent much of her youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. She lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons, Freeman Diallo Perry Rabb and Issa Garner Rabb.
QUOTED: "I wanted to produce a work of feminist theory, or as I call it, liberation feminism, that would speak to the particular conditions of neoliberal capitalism and the hypermedia age—this eruption of digital media, where things that look like democratic spaces are at the same time corporate platforms."
"I saw so many uses of the term 'patriarchy' that didn’t actually apprehend the structure of domination. Patriarchy is a project that coincided with the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest. It’s not just attitudes. It’s legal relations between human beings, which lead to very different encounters with violence and suffering."
"The book begins with where patriarchy comes from, and then morphs into the current landscape, in which conditions are different but where that foundational structure is still present. Feminism is ultimately a way of reading the world with an eye towards reducing or eliminating unjust forms of domination, violence, and exploitation."
Imani Perry’s Liberation Feminism
The African-American studies professor sits down with The Nation to discuss books, Beyoncé, and the radical potential of the academy.
By Nawal Arjini
May 29, 2019
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I
mani Perry’s busy year is finally winding down. It’s the end of the semester at Princeton University, where she is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African-American Studies, and she’s at the end of her publicity tours—all three of them, one for each book she published last year: May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, and Looking for Lorraine: A Life of Lorraine Hansberry.
They’re vastly different books, though each approaches its topic with a spirit of loving critique. May We Forever Stand is a cultural history of the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as it rose to ubiquity in black schools, churches, and other social institutions. Vexy Thing is a work of feminist theory, drawing on philosophical and theoretical texts across disciplines. Looking for Lorraine is perhaps the most personal: Perry’s father instilled a love of Lorraine Hansberry’s work in her from an early age. There are many ways in which Perry’s own life and intellectual interests seem like a reflection of Hansberry, in her leftist politics, her deep love of black culture, and her work on gender and sexual liberation.
—Nawal Arjini
Nawal Arjini: OK, so I have to ask you: Beyoncé opened her 2018 Coachella performance with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and in this year’s accompanying album, there’s a track where her daughter sings the song to her—just as your son did, in the scene that opens May We Forever Stand. The setting of the concert, a pep rally in an imaginary black university, also has a lot do to with what you write about in the book, which came out a month before Coachella. What did you make of the performance?
Imani Perry: It reminded me of the culture of pageants in the early 20th century in black communities—historical pageants, which told the story of black life from precolonial Africa to the present, which were such an important part of black institutional and cultural life pre-desegregation. Hundreds of people performed in them, with elaborate outfits and elaborate composition, and a whole body of brilliant dramaturges, many of whom were black women. It’s a really wonderful remix of history: Beyoncé created a pageant for the 21st century that recounted the institutional practices and spaces where pageants used to exist. She gave the public an encapsulated black cultural history.
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There is a powerful symbolism to having her daughter learn the song; that was a huge part of [pageant culture], the socialization of children to give them a sense of themselves that was far beyond and far greater than the inequality and degradation they experienced in everyday life. It was beautiful. But it’s also important to think about the crisis of this moment that makes the desire to return to those types of practices feel so urgent and resonate so deeply.
NA: How are your three books connected, to this moment or to each other?
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IP: Lorraine Hansberry is a proto-exemplar of the kind of liberation feminism I’m talking about in Vexy Thing, but she was also a product of the kind of black institutional life I’m talking about in May We Forever Stand. So she’s at the center of the two other more academic projects.
NA: That was striking—you talk about Looking for Lorraine as a “third-person memoir,” you open May We Forever Stand with a personal anecdote, and in Vexy Thing you often write in the first person. How do you think about that kind of subjectivity?
IP: Academic training often encourages mythmaking around objectivity, a pretense that your work is not grounded in ideology or experience. That’s absolutely not true. In order to develop the passion to live with a project for years, it has to resonate with you personally. The imperative is rigor, so your opinions don’t overwhelm the serious or critical work. I have never felt a need to pretend that I don’t have a life and commitments that shape the work. I don’t feel self-conscious about it—it’s not as though I sacrificed rigor.
NA: There are so many constraints within the academy on what you can publish and what you can teach. How do you navigate those boundaries?
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IP: It helped to make the transition to African-American studies, which draws on multiple disciplines, because the traditional disciplines don’t fully get to the experiences of marginalized people anyway. When you pursue African-American studies, you have to have flexibility in terms of methodology, and a willingness to be expansive and experimental.
I talked to [law professor] Derrick Bell when I first started teaching at [Rutgers University] Law School. I said, “Well, I want to do all this unconventional stuff, and you do all this unconventional stuff—how do I navigate this?” He told me, “Write a lot. Whatever you write will be highly objectionable to a lot of people, but if you write enough of it, they probably can’t derail your career.”
NA: Each chapter of Vexy Thing comes at the question of gender and liberation from a totally different standpoint. What prompted the project, and how did you choose your methods?
IP: I wanted to produce a work of feminist theory, or as I call it, liberation feminism, that would speak to the particular conditions of neoliberal capitalism and the hypermedia age—this eruption of digital media, where things that look like democratic spaces are at the same time corporate platforms.
I saw so many uses of the term “patriarchy” that didn’t actually apprehend the structure of domination. Patriarchy is a project that coincided with the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest. It’s not just attitudes. It’s legal relations between human beings, which lead to very different encounters with violence and suffering. The book begins with where patriarchy comes from, and then morphs into the current landscape, in which conditions are different but where that foundational structure is still present. Feminism is ultimately a way of reading the world with an eye towards reducing or eliminating unjust forms of domination, violence, and exploitation.
NA: A lot of those concepts are used much more often and familiarly when people talk about racial domination than with the patriarchy—people have been studying the relationship between race and gender and domination for a very long time, but in the language of activists and mainstream discourse, do you feel that there’s a gap that you were filling?
IP: I always feel two ways about things! It’s good for academic work to be applicable to the work of organizing. All these academic concepts have moved into the mainstream, sometimes in very useful ways—but also in ways that are very difficult for organizers. Organizing is a collective, transformative process. Academics engage, more than anything, in critique. If you begin from the position of critique, it’s difficult to bring people into organizing, to be about the process of transformation, and to work with other human beings.
NA: I was here a couple of months ago, when [the poet, theorist, and critic] Fred Moten gave a lecture to a packed room. There’s such interest among students, especially academically inclined students, toward critiques like his of the university’s potential to accommodate black students, people of color, leftists of color. What’s your response to that?
IP: On the one hand, universities are of the society, so they entail all the structures of inequality that we’d see in any other institution. There’s a particularly pernicious element in that they are the spaces in which knowledge is produced. Being at the site of knowledge production, there’s a lot of potential danger. People are trained to think in ways that legitimize domination.
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On the other hand, the university is one of the rare sites where there’s even the prospect of having explicitly Marxian or leftist or feminist politics within the site of employment. Lots of places become sites of struggle, but being a faculty member at a university is one of the rare places where you can have your work attached to your politics—which is not to suggest that there’s not backlash, and not to suggest that universities aren’t complicit in all kinds of forms of domination, whether it’s of support staff, or adjunct labor, or academic exploitation.
NA: Universities aren’t Marxist themselves, but they give room for people like you.
IP: My friends who are red-diaper babies, or movement babies—depending on which part of the struggle you come from—they’re either in academia or they’re in the nonprofit world. Both places are problematic in their own way, but that’s where they’ve gone, because those are places where you can at least hold onto your ideas.
NA: Would you talk about the relationship between working in the department you work in—a top-ranked African-American studies department—and being in Princeton, as both a university and a town?
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IP: It’s an extraordinary department, and Princeton as a university has treated me very well. I love that we increased the number of first-generation and Pell Grant–eligible students in the student body. I feel the difference; it makes the classrooms much more rigorous spaces. It changes the classroom dynamic, the questions that emerge, the ways in which students are pushed to think.
People in our department live in Princeton, and seem to be perfectly comfortable. For me, it’s not particularly appealing. It’s so important for me to live in close proximity to a substantial black community, and places that are racially and class- and immigration-status diverse.
NA: So living in Philly is good for your academic work?
IP: Oh yes. It’s very good for my personal life and makes a difference in my work. I walk past beauty-supply stores and check-cashing places and Ross Dress for Less and Walmart, and that helps me think. It’s useful for making good work, having both the everyday and the academic.
NA: Do you see changes in the students who come to your department? In terms of who they are, or what they want out of their education?
IP: People assume that first-generation students, or students from poor and working-class backgrounds, are the most concerned with getting a job or getting out [of their situations], and I find the opposite. In fact they’re more likely to approach the classroom with a deep commitment to asking serious intellectual questions about ideas and social relations. Obviously, there are kids across the spectrum who have that, but it’s a higher proportion of the kids who are less privileged. It elevates the level of conversation in classes; there’s less of a taking “living the life of the mind” for granted. It’s good for all of us.
I don’t yet think that we have figured out how to make the university a place that is equally caring to all students, and that seems to be the next stage of aspiration that we have to pursue. The student body is shifting. How should we shift to accommodate the student body?
NA: When I was in college, consciously or not, we would always go to professors of color, women of color, to ask for help—they were the people who shouldered that burden of handling the shift in the student body.
IP: I feel conflicted about that narrative, and I heard it a lot: “You’ll be expected to work twice as hard.” That’s true, but I do it because that’s my calling. I do it because those are my politics. I want to pour into students what was poured into me: care about me as a whole human being. I do think the institutions should find a way to acknowledge that additional labor, but I don’t resent it. Maybe some people do, but for me, it is part of why I’m here. Also we owe a lot of our position to students. It’s not because we aren’t excellent, but student demands have made universities open their doors to women faculty, to faculty of color, and as a consequence we have mutual responsibility. I feel extreme gratitude towards students who have decided that the work that I have devoted my life to is meaningful for them.
Imani Perry
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Imani Perry
Born
September 5, 1972
Birmingham, Alabama
Academic background
Alma mater
Yale University (BA)
Harvard University
(JD, PhD)
Academic work
Institutions
Princeton University
Main interests
Race, Law, African American culture
Website
http://www.imaniperry.com/
Imani Perry (born September 5, 1972, in Birmingham, Alabama, United States) is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Perry is the author of five books and has published numerous articles on law, cultural studies, and African-American studies, including a book about Lorraine Hansberry.[1] She also wrote the notes and introduction to the Barnes and Nobles Classics edition of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth.[2] Her work is largely influenced by the Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools, Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and African-American literary criticism.[3] Through her scholarship, Perry has made significant contributions to the academic study of race and American hip hop music; she contributed a chapter to 2014's Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic (edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai).
Contents
1
Academia and career
2
Book titles
3
Controversy over arrest
4
Notes
5
External links
Academia and career[edit]
Perry received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in American Studies and Literature from Yale University in 1994. She subsequently earned her Ph.D. in American Civilization from Harvard University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School (from which she graduated at the age of 27). She completed a Future Law Professor's Fellowship and received her LLM from Georgetown University Law Center.[4] She credits her childhood exposure to diverse cultures, regions, and religions with her desire to study race.[5]
Before joining the Princeton faculty, Perry taught at Rutgers School of Law in Camden for seven years. She received the New Professor of the Year award in her first year and was promoted to full professor at the end of five years, also winning the Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. Perry was also a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an adjunct professor at both the Columbia University Institute for Research in African American Studies and Georgetown University Law Center.[6]
In 2009, Perry left Rutgers to join the faculty of Princeton University. She currently holds the title of Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies and is affiliated with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies.[7] She has two forthcoming books, one on the history of the black national anthem (from Oxford University Press) and another on gender, neoliberalism, and the digital age (from Duke University Press).[8]
In August 2014, Perry appeared on the public radio and podcast On Being, discussing race, community, and American consciousness with host Krista Tippett.[9]
Perry's research interests within African-American studies include:
Citizenship
American Politics
Intellectual Traditions
Neoliberalism
Culture and Life
Feminist Thought
Religious Thought
Book titles[edit]
2019: Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Penguin Random House ISBN 978-0807076552
2018: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Beacon Press. ISBN 0807064491
Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018
A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction
A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalist
A Triangle Award Finalist
2018: May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 978-1-4696-3860-7
Nominee, 50th NAACP Image Awards, Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction)
2018: Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, Duke University Press. ISBN 9781478000600
2011: More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, New York University Press; ISBN 0814767370
2004: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Duke University Press; ISBN 0822334356
2005: Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Barnes & Noble Classics Series, Notes and Introduction, Barnes & Noble; ISBN 9781593082932
Controversy over arrest[edit]
On February 6, 2016, Perry was pulled over by the Princeton police for speeding.[10] Her driver’s license was found to be suspended due to unpaid parking tickets, one of which was two–three years old. Perry was arrested for the outstanding warrant and physically searched. She was handcuffed, transported to the police station, and handcuffed to a bench during the booking process. Perry posted bail and was released.[11] Perry drew parallels between her experience and the ongoing national conversation concerning the mistreatment of African Americans in police custody.[12] She appeared in municipal court the month after her arrest and paid $428 in traffic fines.[13]
QUOTED: "a masterfully poetic and intimate work that anchors mothering within the long-standing tradition of black resistance and resourcefulness."
Perry, Imani BREATHE Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $18.00 9, 17 ISBN: 978-0-8070-7655-2
A distinguished scholar writes to her sons about the joy, possibility, and grace of black life amid ongoing American struggles with race, gender, and class.
Carrying on an iconic legacy of public letters from black writers--think James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Kiese Laymon, among many others--Perry (African American Studies/Princeton Univ.; Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, 2018, etc.) reflects on her family history, tying it together with cultural allegories to impress upon her sons the precious inheritance found within black social life and the pursuit of a livelihood full of "passion, profound human intimacy and connection, beauty and excellence." A multidisciplinary and acclaimed researcher, Perry uses references throughout the slim volume that range across centuries and the global black diaspora, across folklore, music, and visual arts as well as the influence of numerous faith traditions. "The people with whom you can share the interior illumination," she writes, "that is the sacramental bond." She breaks down the structures of violence and marginalization that black children face while uplifting the imaginative and improvisatory space for them to focus on their becoming, to not be trapped in misnarrated stories or "forced into two dimensions when you are in four." Echoing Baldwin's distinctive "Letter to My Nephew," Perry emphasizes the critical life discipline of making choices--not in the shallow sense of choosing success or achievement but rather within the depths of the long, historic freedom struggle to answer important questions--e.g., "How will you treat your word? How will you hold your heart? How will you hold others?" Deeply intergenerational, the book blurs intended audiences to call all of us to face up to legacies of injustice while insisting on the grace and conviviality necessary to imagine just futures.
A masterfully poetic and intimate work that anchors mothering within the long-standing tradition of black resistance and resourcefulness.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Perry, Imani: BREATHE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591278811/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4753ddfb. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591278811
QUOTED: "This mother's striking and generous admonition to thrive even in the face of white mendacity also is a meditation on parenting."
* Breathe: A Letter to My Sons.
By Imani Perry.
Sept. 2019.176p. Beacon, $18 (9780807076552). 306.85.
Perry, a Princeton professor and author of the award-winning Looking for Lorraine (2018), presents, in the tradition of W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, a letter to her two sons, and to all Black boys, encouraging them to stand back I up in the face of stumbling. Voiced the way an African American mom might say it when whites are not around, and told against the backdrop of police killings of Black men (notably Eric Garner, whose words "I can't breathe" ring in the title), Perry's missive may echo a general American regret about the mismatch between Black crime and punishment. Perry shares well-told and funny memories of family trips to Alabama, Chicago, and Cambridge, which signal heritage and privilege, and innumerable gems from Black cultural thinkers on perseverance. This mother's striking and generous admonition to thrive even in the face of white mendacity also is a meditation on parenting. Reflective insights about injustice adjoin a few visceral apologies about every responsible parent's regrets, which might remind parents of the divide between "the deed of giving life" and "the social consequence of the deed." For Black boys and their parents who struggle to get childhood and mothering-along or fathering-along correct: "Just always remember: even if you tumble ... you must move towards freedom."--Sean Chambers
YA: YAs will be moved by Perry's candid letter to her sons about facing racism and seeking freedom. SC.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chambers, Sean. "Breathe: A Letter to My Sons." Booklist, 1 June 2019, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A593431343/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9eb23bdd. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A593431343
QUOTED: "Although she died young, at thirty-four, her brilliant intellect and talent are captured in this thoughtful biography."
* Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.
By Imani Perry. Read by LisaGay Hamilton.
2018.8.5hr. Dreamscape, CD, $34.99 (9781974924431).
Lorraine Hansberry, best known for her play A Raisin in the Sun, was also a deep political thinker and social activist who wrote essays, poems, plays, and fiction. In this beautifully written celebration of the artist, Perry delves into Hansberry's writings (including journals and letters) to explore her inner journey through the mid-twentieth century in New York City and Chicago. Ignoring the usual strict biographical structure, Perry sketches the author's growth from student to successful author using precisely chosen excerpts from Hansberry's private writings. The author's commentary adds historical and personal perspective as she interprets Hansberry's words. Reader Hamilton moves easily from narrative to excerpts, distinguishing the quoted material with a change of voice and rhythm. Her voice becomes softer, almost sultry, as she reads Hansberry's letters and journals, adding intimacy to the words. Quotes from other people in the author's life, including her husband, Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish leftist, are read with appropriate accents and tones. Hansberry was a complex woman and writer who was a Communist, lesbian, and a militant reformer living in a world of racism and misogyny. Although she died young, at 34, her brilliant intellect and talent are captured in this thoughtful biography, read sensitively by the talented Hamilton.--Candace Smith
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Candace. "Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2018, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A563682682/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=91019197. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A563682682
QUOTED: "Perry infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm. ... Impressively, she tells her subject's story in a tightly packed 200 pages."
Perry, Imani LOOKING FOR LORRAINE Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 9, 18 ISBN: 978-0-8070-6449-8
An intimate portrait of the artist as a black woman at the crossroads.
Perry (African-American Studies/Princeton Univ.; May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, 2018, etc.) feels strongly that Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) is an "important writer who has far too little written about her [and]...about her life." This is a deeply personal book, less a biography than perhaps a "third person memoir" or "homage." Perry infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm because she believes Hansberry has something to teach us in these "complicated times." Impressively, she tells her subject's story in a tightly packed 200 pages. In her early years, Hansberry was radiant. The middle-class girl who grew up on Chicago's South Side wasn't the best student, but she had a "gift for leadership." She displayed a sense of melancholy and loneliness as well as an insatiable intellectual yearning. After briefly attending the University of Wisconsin, she moved to New York, first to Greenwich Village and then Harlem, where she immersed herself in politics and 1950s activism with other intellectuals and artists. She married her partner in the radical left, Robert Nemiroff, in 1953. They divorced, amicably, in 1964, and Nemiroff would remain a friend, caretaker, and champion of her writings and legacy. Perry argues that we must deal head-on with Hansberry's sexuality; it's "unquestionable" that she was a lesbian, and the author discusses it in detail. Perry also smartly delves into the inspirations for Hansberry's brilliant The Raisin in the Sun (kitchenette buildings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes) and engagingly explores Hansberry's profound friendships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. In her later years, Hansberry was an American radical; radicalism "was both a passion and a commitment. It was, in fact, a requirement for human decency."
Throughout this animated and inspiring biography, Perry reminds us that the "battles Lorraine fought are still before us: exploitation of the poor, racism, neocolonialism, homophobia, and patriarchy."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Perry, Imani: LOOKING FOR LORRAINE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544637916/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e6dfc489. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544637916
QUOTED: "recommended."
Perry, Imani. May we forever stand: a history of the black national anthem. North Carolina, 2018. 280p index ISBN 9781469638607 cloth, $26.00; ISBN 9781469638614 ebook, $19.99
(cc) 56-1426
ML3561
CIP
Distinguished historian Perry (Princeton) offers a breezy overview of the ways the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing" has been mobilized across 100 years of US freedom struggles. A concise biographical overview of the famous Johnson brothers who wrote the song--poet James Weldon Johnson and composer/singer J. Rosamond Johnson--places their achievement among those who "understood that each accomplishment was meaningful for the aspirations of the [African American] race as a whole." In chapter 1, the author offers a strong formulation of what she calls "black formalism" (distinct from the politics of respectability), i.e., "practices that were primarily internal to the black community, rather than those based upon a white gaze or an aspiration for white acceptance." Claiming that the singing of "Lift Every Voice" would become a consistent element of the ritual behaviors that were part of black formalism, Perry argues for the song's usefulness in the New Deal era and during the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement. Elegiac renderings of the ways that Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the second verse lyrics precede a lament, in the final chapter, that black formalism declined in the 1990s, when "black associationalism was ... unpracticed for black adults who had come of age after desegregation." Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers.--T. F. DeFrantz, Duke University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
DeFrantz, T.F. "Perry, Imani. May we forever stand: a history of the black national anthem." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Dec. 2018, p. 473. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A564128319/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ab1be92b. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A564128319
QUOTED: "Compressing her life, one in which her charisma, personal warmth, intellectual confidence, hard-hitting and often unpopular political and racial justice stances were much in evidence, must have been no easy task for Imani Perry, professor of African-American studies at Princeton. Looking for Lorraine is a deeply felt biography."
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
by Imani Perry
Beacon Press. 256 pages, $26.95
DOZENS OF WORKS of literary criticism and biographies for young readers (but not adults) have been written about playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), author of the classic play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Compressing her life, one in which her charisma, personal warmth, intellectual confidence, hard-hitting and often unpopular political and racial justice stances were much in evidence, must have been no easy task for Imani Perry, professor of African-American studies at Princeton.
Looking for Lorraine is a deeply felt biography in which Perry expresses her feelings of oneness with Hansberry through similarities in their backgrounds and reactions to political events. The book also offers critiques of many of Hansberry's works, both published and unpublished. Its title was chosen as an homage to Isaac Julien's 1989 film Looking for Langston. Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem" contains the line that provided the title for A Raisin in the Sun: "What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?/... Or does it explode?"
The youngest of four, Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930 into a highly educated and well-to-do family. These attributes did nothing to insulate the family from violence and hatred, experiences that would appear in different forms in Hansberry's plays and other writings. Hansberry was the first African-American in the women's dorm at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when she started college as an applied arts major in 1948. Popular and quick to make friends, she took part in student productions. Her favorite play was Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, which was set in the slums of Dublin. She found, as Perry notes, that it came from "a people for whom there was poetry in everyday expression."
However, Hansberry was not interested in the academic life. She withdrew from school after two years and moved to Harlem, where she took an editorial and writing position at Freedom, a weekly newspaper published by Paul Robeson. She'd originally met Robeson, as well as Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, when they visited her family during her childhood in Chicago. Her politics brought her to the attention of the FBI, and their surveillance began. But, writes Perry, "[t]hey would look for everything, and see very little."
In 1953, she married editor and publisher Robert Nemiroff. Little is known of their private life, but he was a great support to her during their years together, even after their 1962 divorce. In Perry's chapter "Sappho's Poetry," she delicately explores some of what is known about Hansberry's same-sex relationships, though this is not the major focus of Looking for Lorraine. Perry analyzes Hansberry's unpublished play "Flowers for the General," about a lesbian love affair, "melodramatically composed and yet realistic," so that it "could have easily been true." As "L.H.N." she wrote letters to the Daughters of Bilitis magazine The Ladder, and as "Emily Jones" she wrote short stories for both The Ladder and the Mattachine's ONE magazine. Though Perry does not cite J. R. Roberts, it was Roberts' annotated bibliography Black Lesbians (1981) that credited Ladder editor Barbara Grier with outing Hansberry in 1970 as the author of these letters and short stories.
In the late 1950s, Hansberry paid her first visit to Provincetown. One of her lovers, whom she probably met there, was photographer Molly Malone Cook (later the partner of poet Mary Oliver). It was in 1958 that she met James Baldwin, to whom she became "Sweet Lorraine," and around the same time that she met Nina Simone, who said that when they got together, they never spoke of trivial matters. "It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution--real girls' talk."
Perry reproduces a list, both "mundane and profound," that Hansberry made in 1960, of her likes and hates. "I like," wrote Hansberry, "my homosexuality." The list of likes includes ten entries about women and one about her husband. In her list of hates, "my homosexuality" is back, along with racism, death, pain, and the writings of Genet and Sartre.
Not surprisingly, Perry devotes a good deal of attention to Raisin in the Sun. It was the first play on Broadway by an African-American woman. Hansberry was the first black woman to win a Drama Critics' Circle Award, in 1959. The show ran for 530 performances on Broadway, and its cast of luminaries included Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. Its success allowed Hansberry to buy a building in the Village. She rented an apartment to Dorothy Secules, a successful businesswoman with whom she was intimately involved.
Near the end of her life, she wrote in her journal: "When I get my health back I think I shall have to go into the South to find out what kind of revolutionary I am." She was immersed in a number of writing projects almost to the moment of her death in 1965, at age 34, of metastatic pancreatic cancer. Her funeral, attended by over 700 people (including Malcolm X, just a few weeks before his assassination) was a star-studded event, featuring many of her friends from show business. Of the many honorary pallbearers, one was Dorothy Secules. There is so much more to learn about Hansberry: perhaps more will be revealed in Margaret B. Wilkerson's Lorraine Hansberry: Am I a Revolutionary? whose publication is expected next year.
Caption: Martha E. Stone is the literary editor of this magazine.
Caption: Lorraine Hansberry on the roof of337 Bleeker Street, the West Village flat where she lived with husband Robert Nemiroff. Photo by Nat Fein.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
http://glreview.com
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stone, Martha E. "The Revolution Will Be Dramatized." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 25, no. 6, 2018, p. 36+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A561566037/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=afb9bd31. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A561566037
QUOTED: "The book will provide plenty of discussion points in undergraduate and graduate classrooms."
49-1786
E184
2010-39826
CIP
Perry, Imani. More beautiful and more terrible: the embrace and transcendence of racial inequality in the United States. New York University, 2011. 248p index afp ISBN 9780814767368, $70.00; ISBN 9780814767375 pbk, $22.00; ISBN 9780814768181 e-book, contact publisher for price
Employing an interdisciplinary method in her approach to the complex matter of racial inequality in the US, Perry (African American studies, Princeton) offers an insightful "third way" analysis. At bottom, she emphasizes developing a new way to comprehend racial inequality. Some will probably contend that this is an idealistic stance by the author that endeavors to move beyond the usual boundaries of racial discourse. Key to her perspective is to go beyond "intentional racism" to a more nuanced and sophisticated examination, calling it "post-intentional" discrimination. In other words, Perry explains that there is a ubiquitous "unconscious racism" in US society. The book will provide plenty of discussion points in undergraduate and graduate classrooms and beyond, and is a good fit for cutting-edge graduate and faculty research. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Lower-division undergraduates and up.--M. Christian, Lehman College
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christian, M. "Perry, Imani. More beautiful and more terrible: the embrace and transcendence of racial inequality in the United States." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2011, p. 606. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A271880288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e1d478d7. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A271880288
QUOTED: "Looking for Lorraine is not a complete rendering of Hansberry's life, but it is a full and holistic one. After finishing the piles of papers and assignments for the fall semester, students should pick up Perry's book; at less than 250 pages, it may provide a much-needed palate cleanser after months of academia."
Byline: Malachy Dempsey
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is one of the foundational books behind English curricula across the country. In Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, African American studies scholar Imani Perry presents a full look at its percipient playwright.
Hansberry was born toward the beginning of the Great Depression and died toward the end of the Civil Rights Movement. In her 34 years, Hansberry became the first black woman to open a show on Broadway. She also wrote for a pan-Africanist newspaper and she was recognized as one of the up-and-coming artist-activists of her time.
"There are enticing details: she was a Black lesbian woman born into the established Black middle class who became a Greenwich Village bohemian leftist married to a man, a Jewish communist songwriter," Perry writes. "She cast her lot with the working classes and became a wildly famous writer. She drank too much, died early of cancer, loved some wonderful women and yet lived with an unrelenting loneliness."
Although Perry's biography follows the standard biographical style, she notes from the beginning that she does not want the book to be some disinterested statement of facts. In fact, Perry acknowledged her own baggage and biases before she began the biography--something most biographers leave unsaid.
The point that Perry makes is that even though Hansberry was remarkable and revolutionary, she was still just a person. While her works--like A Raisin in the Sun-- stay "static" after they're written, Hansberry was a real person with real prowess and real problems.
These aspects come clearly to a reader as Perry simply recounts Hansberry's life. She did not exit the womb with a playwright's pen or a desire to shake the status quo. She wanted to be a lawyer before she wanted to be a journalist before she wanted to be a visual artist before she wanted to be a playwright, an activist and an icon.
That no significant biographies have been written about Hansberry as a whole person clearly animates Perry. How could a woman who moved so deliberately through the circles Hansberry moved through receive only "persistent flatness" in retellings of her life?
Perry produces many passages that roll over the reader like water, maintaining a largely readable style throughout the book. Notably, she treats Hansberry--who she refers to as Lorraine throughout--as a close friend. She's not putting Hansberry on display for present-day readers to judge as much as she is eulogizing the life of a loved one.
Audiences who enter Looking for Lorraine expecting a biography that emphasizes an historian's rigorous look at a long-passed public figure may be disappointed. While she declines to leave out the bad bits of Hansberry's life, Perry explicitly describes her book as an "homage" to Hansberry.
At one point, Perry declines to further investigate a mysterious signature scratched out in one of Hansberry's old yearbooks with the logic that "the biographer mustn't venture from archaeology to intrusion or wild speculation, despite the intriguing possibilities of the latter two."
Although some academic historians may still want to do those deep digs into the details, the lay reader would likely accept the agnosticism. Perry prioritizes the important parts of her subject over the salient gossip.
Looking for Lorraine is not a complete rendering of Hansberry's life, but it is a full and holistic one. After finishing the piles of papers and assignments for the fall semester, students should pick up Perry's book; at less than 250 pages, it may provide a much-needed palate cleanser after months of academia.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 ULOOP Inc.
http://uwire.com/?s=UWIRE+Text&x=26&y=14&=Go
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dempsey, Malachy. "Book Review: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry." UWIRE Text, 29 Nov. 2018, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A580298669/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7a62c135. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A580298669
QUOTED: "beautiful and quietly urgent biography."
"It is a magnificent tribute to an eloquently compassionate scholar following the dual guides of head and heart to Lorraine’s resting place for completion of this part of the journey. Along with seeing more into the soul of one of America’s visionary theatrical and radical lights, Looking for Lorraine is also a love note. A soul serenade."
Book Review | Looking For Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
Joshunda Sanders
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Oct 31, 2018 · 6 min read
A photo of the book cover, art by Beacon Press,
“Her going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other which perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the treads of tanks.” — James Baldwin, “Sweet Lorraine,” Introduction, To Be Young, Gifted and Black.
Now, when the veil is thin. Now, when we have lost another nonconformist Black woman writer who would not be placed in our neat boxes.
Now feels like the best time to write about Imani Perry’s beautiful and quietly urgent biography of the enigmatic, energetic and quirky, sweet playwright James Baldwin loved with such tenderness, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.
I liked Lorraine’s play, A Raisin in The Sun. Because I was supposed to like it. Because it was the first, a first. But really, I have always only loved Lorraine.
I read the play a couple of times because I couldn’t escape it, but it was as far removed from my experience of family life as the Brady Bunch, so I never really connected with it. I could still, though, recognize what an achievement it was for a black woman from Chicago to have launched a play — I understood the magnitude of her achievement, what A Raisin in the Sun represented, what it meant.
The first character in my novella, All City, which emerged out of one of my first short stories is a bad ass Bronx girl named Lorraine who beats up a boy who pulls her hair. When they both get detention, she sort of falls in love with him and his art after their fight. But she is named after Lorraine Hansberry not because she’s a romantic, (though there is that) but because she is a complex Black girl with heart. Because she makes her own way, even with guys in her world — like her brokenhearted daddy — to help her.
I thought of this fictional character but mostly, the real life Lorraine, with such tenderness as I made my way with careful admiration through Imani Perry’s biography.
I was surprised to learn that Lorraine identified as a lesbian; her story has been so obscured that I read this, somehow, as bisexual or sexually fluid over the years, but Perry adds beautiful, respectful and splendid specificity to Lorraine’s queer identity in these pages.
With the addition of the best, most charming lists I’ve ever read in any book, ever, Perry’s succinct and characteristic style describes them well. “The lists are mundane and profound. The great joy of her sexuality and also its difficulty courses through them.”
Page 95 of Looking for Lorraine. Dr. Perry notes that the FBI’s attempts to surveil Lorraine coincided with a morose period of her life & this column of lists appears in her datebook from that period, in 1960.
It is hard, in popular culture, to find examples of black queer artists in conversation historically with one another aesthetically and intellectually in the pursuit of liberation, not entertainment. There is some of this in Sister Love, the letters between Audre Lorde and Pat Parker. There is some of it in James Baldwin’s reflections about Lorraine in his essay collection, The Price of The Ticket. Perry, again, surfaces this significant aspect of identity, noting that both Baldwin and Hansberry commented on the complexity of humanity by way of their works — Baldwin through Another Country and Hansberry through The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.
“Neither saw the struggle for freedom as limited to fights for laws and full citizenship. Freedom dreams led to complex questions about humanity and existence, about who we are and might become…Though they were both most passionately focused on the question of race, it was a question that was never posed in isolation from other structures of difference and domination such as gender, class, and sexuality. And neither of them subjected race to monolithic interpretations. Jimmy and Lorraine understood that people, in all their messiness, had complex architectures inside and among them.”
Perry’s biography of Lorraine is not standard in any sense, except that it does fit well in the canon of biographies of tremendously talented or brilliant Black women visionaries that I cherish, among them Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White; Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd; Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings; Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Painter; as well as Catherine Clinton’s excellent biography of Harriet Tubman.
It’s possible that there was a moment during any one of these books where I came across a line that made my breath catch — I regard reading books like watching movies, after all, and when I find myself at the arc, I get restless. I want to read the end, the acknowledgments, to find out where this is all going, how much time I have left to savor the work.
I was feeling especially tender what with all that has been going on in the world, and my own personal healing of my inner child. Near the end, when Perry writes about Lorraine dying, we read (and I heard, felt with my entire spirit) the words of Essie Barnes, “a quintessential voice from the Black South”:
Little girl you must continue to trust in God, believe and trust him and wait until he reaches you…I wrote you two weeks passed…I am writing against you can write me if you want to, let me know how you feel by now…
I am your friend, Essie Barnes
Your photo in the Jet is cute.
“ ‘Little girl’ is a moniker not unlike the designation ‘sweet’ in Black Southern vernacular. It lets you know that you are cherished. Lorraine was by so many.”
Even re-reading that now and transcribing it now makes me cry, I think, because of how few Black women are cherished. How infrequently we see Black women cherished on the page or in life. Not at the moment of our dying, certainly not while yet we are living.
This simple kindness, heart to heart, no P.S. or formalities to distance them or anything, and this lovely compliment probably looks like most people like no big deal. But to a heart that is withering under stress, under the weight of not being your full self in the world because the complexity is too much, a simple kindness from a Southern sister is everything. It did not save Lorraine’s life but it could save some future Lorraine’s life.
It’s that part that moves me so much.
Of course not everyone would agree hers was a life that should be saved. Perry notes an obituary that attempted to tarnish her legacy with claims of mysticism and angry and while she had righteous anger, Perry wisely notes, “calling a public Black person angry was then, as now, a dagger. It was used to suggest moral failure. Like the other passions, anger is often cast as reckless and useless when in the hearts and minds of Black people, perhaps because passion lies in opposition to passive acceptance…it is living as protest.”
Lest I make myself sound inconsolable as I truly was at the end of this biography — I really didn’t want the book to end — I will leave you to discover, read and digest its exquisite ending on your own, including the acknowledgments. It is a magnificent tribute to an eloquently compassionate scholar following the dual guides of head and heart to Lorraine’s resting place for completion of this part of the journey. Along with seeing more into the soul of one of America’s visionary theatrical and radical lights, Looking for Lorraine is also a love note. A soul serenade.
One of her mentors was Paul Robeson, that robust Renaissance man who did it all with a voice of thunder and a spirit magnifying the dark. At Lorraine’s homegoing service, Robeson quoted from the spiritual, “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.”
He ended on the verse, “Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the air.” And at that farewell, he said, “Lorraine bids us to keep our heads high and hold on to our strength and power to soar like an eagle in the air.”
Who are we, then, to disobey? Imani Perry has sought Lorraine out, again, and discovered her, standing on the shoulders of our ancestors. “The struggle is eternal,” she quotes the freedom fighter Ella Josephine Baker reminding us. “The tribe increases. Somebody carries on.”
QUOTED: "In fitting herself into Hansberry’s story with autobiographical elements, Perry offers a bracing air of familiarity and urgency around the artist."
Righteous
Imani Perry explores the legacy of Lorraine Hansberry—and what she represents in the era of Black Lives Matter.
By Brandon Tensley
Sept 17, 20185:45 AM
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Writer and playwright Lorraine Hansberry poses for a portrait in her apartment in 1959 in New York.
David Attie/Getty Images
As I read Imani Perry’s sophisticated Looking for Lorraine, which digs up the oft-overlooked life and work of activist and writer Lorraine Hansberry, I remembered New York Times film critic A.O. Scott’s review of I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s 2017 award-winning film based on an unfinished manuscript by James Baldwin. In his review, Scott argues that the film is “more of a posthumous collaboration, an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker … and his subject.” Looking for Lorraine, which Perry suggests is “less a biography than a genre yet to be named—maybe third person memoir,” conjures a similar spirit of communion. Using her own personal interest in Hansberry—best known today as the playwright of A Raisin in the Sun—as narrative scaffolding, Perry mines Hansberry’s life, her indefatigable radicalism, and her queerness, and she prods us to consider what this fuller portrait of a categorically transgressive figure reveals about the state of social justice today.
The title of Perry’s book nods to Looking for Langston, an impressionistic 1989 film by Isaac Julien that, while dedicated to Langston Hughes, centers more broadly on queer black life during the Harlem Renaissance. In Perry’s words, “As [Julien] looked for Langston in footage, language, and imagination, I look for Lorraine in words, ideas, and imagination.” And she begins her search with Hansberry’s birthplace: Chicago.
While Hansberry’s family lived comfortably—her father, Carl, was a successful real-estate broker—she quickly learned, as a child, that her relative prominence was no armor against a racist world. After her father began challenging racially restrictive housing covenants in Chicago in the 1930s, the family lived under relentless threat of attack by white mobs; Hansberry’s mother, Nannie, spent evenings guarding the family’s house with a German Luger pistol. That Jim Crow threatened all black Americans, class or any other scraping of privilege be damned, profoundly shaped Hansberry’s broad black consciousness. Years later, at a rally in 1963, she declared that “between the Negro intelligentsia, the Negro middle class, and the Negro this-and-that—we are one people. … As far as we are concerned, we are represented by the Negroes in the streets of Birmingham!” Perry also explores how both she and Hansberry were influenced by their fathers: Perry’s was a Jewish communist with a tenacious belief in black liberation, and Hansberry’s was a civil-rights activist who fought discrimination until, as his famous daughter told it, “American racism helped kill him.”
Yet Hansberry’s passion for social justice stretched beyond America’s borders. Perry spends a meaningful portion of the book charting Hansberry’s experiences abroad. For instance, while she was briefly an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she spent the summer of 1949 in Ajijic, Mexico. Despite its tiny size, the Mexican city had long attracted artists from around the world. For the preternaturally talented Hansberry, Ajijic wasn’t merely some college sojourn: “it is clear that Ajijic was a place where her sense of possibility for her own life, her sense of romance and joy, was expanded and excited,” Perry explains. She rightly refrains from speculating too much about young Hansberry’s intimate life, but it’s hardly a leap to see how her time there—learning from indigenous and queer artists in what was, essentially, a bohemian oasis—must have nurtured her eventual embrace of her own artistic and sexual autonomy.
Imani Perry.
Sameer Khan
In addition to Ajijic, Hansberry traveled to Montevideo, Uruguay. She went there in 1952 for the Inter-American Peace Conference in place of Paul Robeson, who had recently been stripped of his U.S. passport. It’s in these pages that we can see the vastness of Hansberry’s gaze as an activist. Of a march against police violence she joined while in Montevideo, she remarked that “there were police along the streets with their long swords at their sides and their arms crossed and their faces drawn into those long sober expressions peculiar to police all over the world.” Indeed, what made Hansberry a radical was partly her recognition, despite geography, of the enormity of injustice. As Perry recalls, “When I was a child, radical was a compliment my parents gave to people whom they considered smart and politically righteous.” (It’s no surprise, then, that Perry’s father, too, was a Hansberry acolyte: that he revered her “for her radicalism, for her unflinching truth telling, and for being a seeker.”)
Perry dedicates most of her attention to Hansberry’s life in New York, the place she called home beginning in 1950. For a short time, she attended the New School for Social Research, until she dropped out and started working at Robeson’s pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, which she believed “in its time in history, ought to be the Negro journal of liberation.” Hansberry also met the songwriter and publisher Robert Nemiroff, whom she married in 1953. His later success—he co-wrote the 1956 chart-topper “Cindy, Oh Cindy”—gave Hansberry the financial stability she needed to write full-time. In 1959, her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun, about a poor black family living in Chicago (living, in fact, in an apartment not unlike the one Perry lived in for part of her youth), debuted on Broadway and turned her into a celebrity; Baldwin later reflected that “never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage.”
One of the challenges of writing about Hansberry is discussing her sexuality—and that’s because she wasn’t out, at least publicly, while she was alive. She certainly advocated for gender and sexual equality, and Baldwin, who was open about his own sexuality, was a close friend. In the late ’50s, Hansberry also began exploring the growing homophile movement and dating women, even while she was in a straight marriage—something Nemiroff supported.
Beacon Press
And yet, most of what we know about Hansberry’s identity as a lesbian stems from her private writings: essays, letters, poetry, short stories. Perry treats these texts (many of them available only since 2010) with care, tenderly pulling back the veil on a woman who committed her craft to investigating the various facets of identity. In 1960, for instance, Hansberry wrote two lists: “I like” and “I hate.” On the former, she wrote things like “Eartha Kitt’s looks,” “Older Women,” and “My homosexuality.” She included “My homosexuality” on the latter, too. These two lists, Perry writes, illuminate the splendor and pain Hansberry—“the passionate and opinionated intellect and the aesthete”—felt when it came to her sexuality, to the emotional wrestling she kept mostly hidden away: “It is a testament to the delicate strength of her pen that even this exercise in simple accounting became poetry.”
Perry’s concluding pages retrace “the places Lorraine stood.” In a diaristic manner, she recounts her travels in 2017 to Greenwich Village and Harlem (among other places), searching for signs of Hansberry. (There’s less of her in the former, she explains, noting that in lieu of the midcentury bohemia are “cool accumulation and edgy wealth.”) This literal looking for Lorraine transposes Hansberry into the present, into the Black Lives Matter era—and Perry isn’t timid about pointing out how contemporary society still buckles morally on some matters of acceptance. “Where would her place be?” Perry asks. “In Boystown—an expensive upper-crust queer community where her brownness would still be an oddity? Probably not. Although her love of women would be treated more kindly today, there is a good chance Lorraine’s sexuality would be used to push her away from the center of American theater and thought.” Even today, Perry reminds us, one form of oppression all too often crosshatches with, and props up, a litany of others.
In fitting herself into Hansberry’s story with autobiographical elements, Perry offers a bracing air of familiarity and urgency around the artist, whose legacy has faded since her death from cancer in 1965. (She was only 34 years old.) By crisscrossing then and now, Perry insists how important it is that our connection to this history—to Hansberry—survive. Because by learning more about her—revisiting the keen ways in which she interrogated America and its endless betrayals—we, too, are encouraged to become our best and most radical selves. “Lorraine rejected the American project but not America,” Perry writes. “She saw her embrace of radical politics as a commitment to it, to what it could be.”
QUOTED: "Perry presents a feminist reading praxis that examines history, theory and academic scholarship to provide the basis for understanding how patriarchy informs our individual and collective selves. This book should be on the shelf of any graduate student working in the fields of feminist scholarship and critical race theory. Ultimately, while there is much work to do to dismantle 'the patriarchy', Perry’s literary contribution helps set the stage for interrogating its workings and reimagining what liberation could look like."
Book Review: Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry
In Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, Imani Perry offers a powerful historical analysis of patriarchy and domination that draws on a plethora of philosophical, theoretical and artistic texts. Weaving together a unique tapestry to interrogate the structures of patriarchy and to reimagine liberation, this book should be on the shelf of any graduate student working in the fields of feminist and critical race theory, writes Katelan Dunn.
Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation. Imani Perry. Duke University Press. 2018.
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Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation is as much a unique literary tapestry drawing from a plethora of academic, philosophical, theoretical and artistic disciplines and thinkers as it is a powerful statement on patriarchy and domination in an era when we need to be reminded of it most. The book itself reads more as a conversation than a conventional academic text, but this certainly doesn’t exempt the reader from examining the ways in which they are themselves situated along lines of privilege, power and domination and how these work to oppress, marginalise and subjugate.
The title of the book, Vexy Thing, lays the groundwork to prepare individuals for transformative change in the lives and communities in which they live, since the term ‘to vex’ means to torment, to trouble, to upset, to question, to discuss and to debate. Author Imani Perry encourages us to commit to all of the above, as we untangle the term patriarchy: what it means; how it underpins societal values and ideologies; how it has been used as a tool of domination; and its connections to property, national sovereignty and personhood.
Examining how personhood, citizenship, sovereignty, law, art and property have shaped relations of power over the last few centuries and the ways in which patriarchy has normalised gender domination and oppression through the histories of imperialism, legislation and social and political mechanisms, we are also tasked with ‘investigating the historical and philosophical relation between the here and the there’. Yet, this invitation to reimagine, reread and rethink, while also simultaneously challenge both the status quo and a social order that has idealised patriarchy and shaped culture and beliefs, seems, at first, like an impossible task.
This is particularly exacerbated when we unearth ‘the naturalization of binary gender categories that were, and continue to be, applied to citizenries’ (21). While ‘anticolonial, civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements demanded major transformations in the social order of the dominant empire, the United States’ (10), we continue to see a human desire to categorise and organise who we and others are in relation to binary distinctions (male/female, white/non-white, citizen/non-citizen…). Perry argues that while:
gender liberation may not require the evacuation of all categories […] it does require us to imagine that each human being might be afforded access to embodying and experiencing and representing all of the beautiful traits we have ascribed according to gender, irrespective of the accidents of birth of body, the ascriptions of our cultures, or the decisions of identity (239).
The idea that ‘human organization be broad, improvisational, and appropriately contingent and open to change’ (239) is certainly a difficult undertaking, since much of our social organisation is premised on power and domination (who has it and who does not).
As a result, we are confronted with a number of questions in the book, including but not limited to: how might we avoid a structural repetition of the past and emancipate ourselves from the constraints of patriarchy? How do we fashion a new existence for ourselves: one that is inclusive and liberating to everyone without resorting to notions of domination? Who is counted and discounted? What happens to those who are located on the periphery, on the margins of society? Lastly, what would it take to bring people together ideologically, emotionally and structurally?
Perry addresses these questions, asserting that we can emancipate ourselves from the confines of patriarchal domination through myriad means including, firstly, empathic listening and nurturance. Both seem antithetical to the world in which we live, but this is precisely why both are needed in challenging relations of oppression and domination, while also reconfiguring who we are in the present and where we want to be. Such empathic listening requires a practised awareness to understand ourselves both independent of, and in relation to, others and their unique, subjective, lived experiences – in particular, how they have encountered injustice, privilege and relations of domination. This, in and of itself, is transformative, attentive, inclusive and deliberate. Such actions, Perry argues, will help radically transform how we think about ourselves, engage with others and both act and react in ways that have historically been rooted in hierarchies and unequal power relationships.
Secondly, Perry encourages us to use feminism as a verb. In other words, we are enticed to do feminism and feminist work, not just claim it. A transformative feminism is needed to tackle the injustices patriarchy presents and the ideologies and structures it underpins. This entails a critical understanding of how power and its unequal distribution impact us on a personal and collective level, consciousness-raising through community dialogue and transformative action to change current hierarchies on both micro and macro levels. By thinking critically about ‘the manner in which we are all seduced by the logic of patriarchy’ (250) and ‘confront(ing) the ways in which we are implicated in domination, even as we seek to undo it’ (253), we soon recognise that belief without action has no place in a social movement.
Third, Perry inspires the reader to be deliberate about their efforts in reading through forms of gender domination, while both critically interrogating and unpacking our historical and political past in an effort to understand where we are today as both individuals and as part of the collective movement. She writes: ‘Those of us who seek gender liberation ought to think of feminism as a critical reading reactive in which one ‘‘reads through these layers’’ of gendered forms of domination’ (9). This unearthing of ‘both the ‘‘old’’ and the ‘‘new’’ orders” (9) is especially imperative in the social and political landscape we find ourselves in today. By examining our historical past and current positionality, we are tasked with learning from our mistakes in an effort to put our best foot forward, so to speak, for our future selves. This goal is reminiscent of the wise words once spoken by Maya Angelou: ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.’
Furthermore, reading as a reflective practice and praxis entails ‘disrupt(ing) the repetitive unconscious everyday life as readers’ (243), while recognising that the human story is not binary. This call for a ‘praxis of attentiveness to the bodies and lives of others that resists egotistical drift […and] without negating the uniqueness of one another’s trajectories’ (243) is a definite, deliberate and strong departure from relations of domination and power that have come to define a society premised on listening to respond and dominate versus listening to understand and learn.
Fourth, creative possibilities are explored, with the assertion that art can be both transformative and disruptive. One of the most salient examples offered in the book is that of Jennicet Gutiérrez, a Latina trans activist and one of the founders of Familia, a queer immigrants’ rights organisation, who disrupted a reception attended by former US President Barack Obama with a call for him to release members of the LGBT communities from detention centres. Although Gutiérrez was ultimately silenced and removed from the event, Perry argues that this disruption and interruption was a way to address the discrimination and sexual abuse LGBT people face while in the custody of US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), while also creatively breaking codes of civility, social order and decorum. Such acts work to make us think about our own positionality and privilege, while also enabling consciousness-raising and the cultivation of listening politics.
Lastly, Perry highlights the ethics of a curatorial life, where one can pick, hold and defend the elements that describe our reality and act as the very tools that can liberate us from the constraints of power, domination and patriarchy by thinking about ‘how we do and might act, how we survive, how we sustain in response to domination, and how we create’ (243). In imagining ‘gender possibilities that are not beholden to Western patriarchy, [we are able to] re-form and refigure’ (244). We see this shift already happening in the form of gender neutral washrooms, workplace policies that reinforce cultural sensitivity and language surrounding gender identity and expression and in the debut of non-binary driving licenses and birth certificates. Popular culture is also reflecting this shift with shows such as Transparent, Billions and Orange is the New Black, both featuring trans and non-binary actors and challenging the assumption that everyone should assimilate into binary gender categories.
By taking on historical figures and thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, Perry presents a feminist reading praxis that examines history, theory and academic scholarship to provide the basis for understanding how patriarchy informs our individual and collective selves. This book should be on the shelf of any graduate student working in the fields of feminist scholarship and critical race theory. Ultimately, while there is much work to do to dismantle ‘the patriarchy’, Perry’s literary contribution helps set the stage for interrogating its workings and reimagining what liberation could look like.
Katelan Dunn is a Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests and publications centre around social inequality and stratification, gender, social policy, cultural sociology and social justice. She is currently a member of the City of Burlington’s Inclusivity Advisory Committee and has been published in Canadian, American and European sociological journals.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.