Description:

Perry will discuss the mid- to late-twentieth century work of three Black women: Pauli Murray, Adrian Piper and Angela Davis. Each brought a critical black feminist politic to what she calls the Black Narrative jurisprudential tradition. Their thoughts regarding race, gender, ability 
and class, push us to think beyond the limited frames of our current legal constructs. As such, the ideas they present are as much legal arguments as they are “passionate utterances,” invitations to a revised or transformed social and legal grammar that does not yet exist.

Bio: Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies. She is the author of six books. Perry is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, and an author of creative nonfiction. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies. Her writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.