Episode 73 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast is live! I talk with feminist scholar Imani Perry about the intimate ways gender, colonialism, and race intertwine in the histories of patriarchy; how Imani draws on the inspiration of both Lorraine Hansberry and Imani’s grandmother to build a life full of meaning and justice; how scholars can follow their divergent interests down windy roads without burning out; and how her fierce commitment to personal and social ethics is key to how Imani imagines and creates otherwise.
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Imani’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Imani Perry
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a scholar of African American studies, legal history, and cultural studies. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles in journals, as well as articles and reviews in Harpers, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books.
She is the author of five books, including Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Duke University Press, 2018), May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon, 2018), More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York University Press, 2011), Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004).
Key quote
“I see patriarchy as the foundational form of inequality and I wanted to get an understanding of it as not simply as an ideology but as a structure of domination. It’s a structure of domination that didn’t just stand alongside race or capitalism or xenophobia, etc., but it was actually intimately connected to them.”
– Imani Perry on episode 73 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast
