Southbound, Anjali Enjeti
Southbound, Anjali Enjeti
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Southbound
Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change

Author: Anjali Enjeti

Narrator: Anjali Enjeti

Unabridged: 8 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/19/2022


Synopsis

A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult.

The twenty essays of her debut collection, Southbound, tackle white feminism at a national feminist organization, the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the South, voter suppression, gun violence and the gun sense movement, the whitewashing of southern literature, the 1982 racialized killing of Vincent Chin, social media's role in political accountability, evangelical Christianity's marriage to extremism, and the rise of nationalism worldwide.

In our current era of great political strife, this timely collection by Enjeti, a journalist and organizer, paves the way for a path forward, one where identity drives coalition-building and social change.

About Anjali Enjeti

Anjali Enjeti is an award-winning essayist, journalist, and author of debut novel The Parted Earth. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Al Jazeera, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and other venues. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University and lives with her family near Atlanta.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kiran

"Enjeti’s reflections are not only literary. They are also about the “very brown skin” of the woman on the cover. For Enjeti, it was one of the first times that she saw a South Asian face on the front of a book. It reminded her that she could be a part of media or representation, that she could cons......more

Goodreads review by Dawn

"The problem with masks is that it’s very hard to see out of them.” I clung to these words while reading Southbound. The human mind attempts to find connections and for myself these particular words connected the entire collection thematically. Enjeit was referring the mask of silence here, specific......more

Goodreads review by Renata

Sometimes I read a review of an upcoming book and place a hold on it at the library and forget about it, and then months later I get an arrived hold notice and I'm like "wait, what? Oh I guess this does sound like something I'd read..." It's like a surprise book of the month club that I run for myse......more

Goodreads review by Juhi

This is the essay collection I've always wanted! Anjali Enjeti speaks to the experience of being a politically-engaged South Asian woman in the South, and while I know a lot of them personally, we don't have a lot of representation so I've loved following her and her writing. This essay collection b......more