In this episode I’m so happy to welcome historian Prithi Kanakamedala to talk about writing with me. Prithi is a professor of history at Bronx Community College CUNY, and is also a faculty member at CUNY Graduate Center. She is an active public historian, who has worked with a wide range of cultural organizations. One of the projects she worked on as a historian and curator for a wide-ranging public history project called In Pursuit of Freedom, which included an exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Out of this project emerged Prithi’s new book Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough. I was so excited to talk with Prithi about the relationship between her writing and her public history work, and how she sees her role as a historian in relationship to the communities she studies. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Prithi Kanakamedala.
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links, which give me a small kickback when you order books through those links. This is a lovely way to support the show AND the authors featured here. Thanks!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Prithi Kanakamedala, Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough
- In Pursuit of Freedom website
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
- Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places
- Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn
- Harold X. Connolly
- Robert Swan
- Dr. Joan Maynard
- Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
- Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman
- Johanna Fernandez, The Young Lords: A Radical History
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Kamau Ware, Black Gotham Experience
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting The Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and today I'm so happy to welcome historian, Prithi Kanakamedala to talk about writing with me.
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Thank you so much for having me.
Kate Carpenter:
Prithi is a professor of history at Bronx Community College, CUNY, and is also a faculty member at CUNY Graduate Center. She is an active public historian who has worked with a wide range of cultural organizations. One of the projects she worked on as historian and curator was for a wide-ranging public history project called In Pursuit of Freedom, and it included an exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Out of this project emerged Prithi's new book, Brooklynites, the Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough. I was so excited to talk with Prithi about the relationship between her writing and her public history work and how she sees her role as a historian in a relationship to the communities she studies. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Prithi Kanakamedala.
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Actually pre-academic career, pre-coming to CUNY, way back when, dinosaur years ago, I actually had no interest in higher ed or academia and was training as a playwright in my early twenties in London. And so was very interested in narrative, narrative pacing, structures of narratives, traditional arcs of stories, and left that life behind. I was working behind the scenes in dramaturgical services and left that to come back to graduate school. So have had a sort of strange introduction to the ways we write in academia, and actually, like a lot of graduate students, found it really hard. I love everybody else, huge amounts of admiration and respect for brilliant public intellectuals and huge thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, but in graduate school. So moved by the writing and the readings we would do but could never emulate or copy that kind of writing, it just was not my style.
So fast forward 20 years. Obviously I have been in academia for a while now, and I have to say the freedom that comes, I think, with working your way up that tenure track sort of scale and getting tenure or getting promotion, I just felt it, and also just becoming older in general, I just felt really emancipated at some point to be able to write in a way that both seemed true to myself, and I don't mean that in any kind of cheesy, authentic voice type way, but felt true, like this is what Prithi Kanakamedala sounds like when she writes about people from the past. This feels true to me, but also honors, and this is what I hold really sort of dear to myself as a scholar, really centers and honors public audiences in that writing. And by that I mean the litmus test for me is my own mother, for example.
She is, and again, I'm not trying to give you a quaint story, but she's a great example, I think, of somebody who left formal education at 16, never did the higher education thing, fiercely intelligent, can run circles around me, but the writing has to be clear for her. And not just for her, for anyone. So I think my litmus test is always that my ideal reader is, can my mom understand this? Can she follow the writing? Is it moving her in ways that it moves me? And so that really is sort of a very condensed trajectory, but a way in which I think I have felt free as a writer. And also I think just moving back to more creative ways of writing. So it's become completely normal now, and I think the pandemic has really increased or encouraged it, but going back into writing groups, working with other writers, academics who maybe are working on completely different things, whether that's discipline or time period, but that notion of being in community, I think, is one that certainly did not exist when I was in graduate school.
I found my dissertation such a long experience. It was pre-Zoom, it was pre sort of the internet being a thing. So I think all of that feels very full circle for me.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, I want to dive in just to the practical questions of writing. First off, where and when do you work?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
I do not have a very sophisticated answer for this. I am the parent of a very young person under 10. So I write whenever I can and I know I listen to all sorts of podcasts with writers that I greatly admire, and you write every day. That does not happen in my world. I teach, I grade, I write emails, I write plenty of emails, but I don't get to write every day. But what I can sort of share is, during the writing of this book, Brooklynites, I benefited greatly from being on sabbatical. That's one. And the second one is when I came off sabbatical because of just my stars aligning and funders funding this kind of work, I wasn't in a classroom, and so I really did get a kind of rhythm to it. So my writing partner on the book is the brilliant scholar, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, whose book, Cities We Need, is out now too.
And we wrote together via Zoom and it was lovely. We're both, again, parents to young people. So it would start off with like, "Well, here's the trouble with school," Or, "Here's the trouble with what we're doing." And then even though we're writing about different time periods, different sets of concerns about how we make our cities, we're really sort of writing about similar themes, I would say, which is how do we as ordinary people be in community with others and create the kind of city we want to live in? And sure enough that professional advice is the more you write, the better you get at it or the easier it becomes, I would say is very true. So that one year of sabbatical we wrote consistently, I think it was every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We would be on Zoom for three hours. And again, all of that sort of playwriting experience, sometimes you can spend three hours on that Zoom and produce no pages, and just to give yourself grace around it.
And sometimes you are feeling like a genius and you're producing two, three pages of text. So yeah, no sophisticated answer. I have huge respect for anybody who says, "I don't have a particular practice." Give yourself grace. As it happens, it happens.
Kate Carpenter:
Are there specific places where you like to do your writing?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Are there specific places I like to write? Goodness. Do you know what? This sounds slightly random because this is not how I wrote the book. I love writing on the train. Amtrak, which I don't get to take very often anymore, is one of the best places to write. And I'll tell you why. You can find you're in that little space, but you can look out the window, you can only do it for a finite amount because that train is leaving at a certain time and getting in at a certain time. And I feel like there's a huge riding metaphor in this train thing, but I'm literally talking about public transportation and just riding vehicles. I find I'm really productive when I'm on a train or in New York City, you're on the subway, I'm with my phone on my Google Doc. But otherwise I don't do well with writing… There are amazing writing retreats here in the United States. I don't do well with those. I kind of do much better just writing in familiar places. So my apartment, the office, on campus, but definitely the Amtrak.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you like to organize yourself? Are there tools that you use?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Are there tools that I use? Again, I'm so sorry. This is not a sophisticated answer, and I think it's revealing my sort of Gen X stroke millennial divide. I was born in a year that sort of straddles both generations. I never got onto Zotero or some people are fantastic about manipulating Google Drive to create folders and do all that. I am still very much old school. Stuff goes in a binder sometimes, stuff lives on my phone sometimes and sometimes stuff goes in the Google Drive and it's great because I can search where I've put my notes from a particular archival trip, but no particular system. And I realized the response I'm giving sounds like a nightmare to archivists and librarians everywhere. Like, what do you mean it lives on your phone? But sometimes you just take photos of archives and it just sits on your phone.
You're like, "I know where that is. That's the photo that was taken before I took that selfie and it's after the photo I took of the subway. I know where that photo is." But yeah, not a very model-esque answer of how I research and keep my stuff organized.
Kate Carpenter:
I love it. No one seems to have a model answer.
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Oh, good.
Kate Carpenter:
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Gosh, I have worked in public history, and if it's not called public history, definitely in terms of writing for the public for so long now, I don't think there comes a point in the research. I actually think it comes the other way around because often, definitely when I'm not writing a traditional book, I'm often writing pitches, whether that is a pitch for funding, a pitch for an exhibit or something that is public facing. So I don't think my brain works in quite the same way as, say, had I been a traditional academic thinking about, okay, I feel like I'm at a good place with the research, I can make sense of this, and now what is the narrative around it? I think my goal is always to create a very loose narrative. What is the thing I'm trying to tackle here? What is that sort of research question, but have it be, what is the research question, but more importantly, what's the so what of it all? Why do we need to tackle this particular topic or theme or set of ideas now? What's the urgency around it?
And then I feel as though it works its way backwards, right? Okay, now I've got the urgency of it. Now I've got why this needs to be publicly known or public facing in some way. Now what's my evidence? What is the thing around it? So very different. I would also say I think that comes out of training of working in museums for a really long time, right? Museums always do it backwards. They do the exhibit, "This is what we're going to be doing, this is our story," And then it is curator, historian, go find the stuff, go find those artifacts that we're going to show. And you're like, "But those artifacts don't exist. Why did you pitch it this way?" Or, "But that's not the story. I haven't even looked at the archives yet." So I do think something about my training has become less anxious about that model and more as in, no, I need to know what it is I'm applying for.
Why am I applying for this funding? What is the big question about the ways in which we organize life that I'm trying to answer or give evidence of? And then the research hopefully is somewhat there, but there's no, again, neat response.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you ever find that the thing you pitched once you go to do the research, you find you have to take a very different direction?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Oh God, all the time. And I think those are the best scholars, historians, storytellers. I think I put myself in their great company. I think lots of folks will tell you that story. I went in with one idea and the thing ended up being something else. I can give you so many examples in which that's existed professionally in the past and how it's existing in the present and I'm tackling it now. When I worked on the public history project, In Pursuit of Freedom, that this book, Brooklynites, with NYU Press comes out of… Again, a grant writer had written the pitch and a couple of really brilliant museum professionals who have a great grounding in history added to it. So the pitch was, in 19th century, Brooklyn, black and white activists came together to abolish slavery and to create legal and political freedoms for the free black communities in Brooklyn and New York. So that was the top level story. And then as I was brought on and we started to do this research, actually none of that was true.
It wasn't this world we made together of black and white people trying to make a better world for everyone else. It was a much more radical and I think truer story of how life works, which is it was people of African descent in Brooklyn who were pushing forward the promise of democracy, which was, we have this whole American revolution, we have all these lofty ideas about freedom and independence, well, here's how that dream falls short for us, and here's how we are going to organize and mobilize, here is how self-determination will play in our lives, and here's how we're going to push back at those ideas. And I think trying to push that narrative, which sounds honestly so quaint now in a sort of after George Floyd and after Black Lives Matter, you're like, well, of course that would've been the story was actually a little bit radical 15 years ago of saying, yes, the abolition movement in U.S history is about black and white historical actors coming together, but actually Brooklyn tells a completely different story.
So that happens all the time. I have a academic essay about another person that I'm writing about, George DeGrasse, who has, in the census, that he was born in Calcutta and other historians, people who I greatly admire, Carla Peterson, Craig Wilder, have talked about George DeGrasse being Hindu. He's from India, he's from Calcutta, he's Hindu, and he's listed in the census as H-I-N-D-O-O, Hindoo. And as I was doing my research around him, I was like, oh, I think the Hindoo bit's just a casual interchangeable term with Indian and that this man might actually have been Muslim, and then you pick it apart. And I never really questioned the Calcutta bit because it was on the census and I was like, well, he could have been from Calcutta, he could have been from any part of India, but he made himself legible. I'll take India. And honestly, and this is why I always sort of caution about the written word being the be all and the end all because that's an academic essay.
It was published many years ago. It's sitting in a beautiful book of essays. And I looked more recently, and it looks like Aaron Burr, the former vice president who George DeGrasse has a relationship to, had a huge, huge sort of family, maybe not consensual at all in any way, but he has blood relations in the Caribbean. And again, thinking about, could this be possible that this man was not from India at all, but was Indo-Caribbean, and it's a really early example of that sort of South Asian diaspora? And it's interesting, how do you then go back, which is what I'm working on, to say, "Hey, I published that thing five, six years ago, but actually I think what I wrote was wrong."? I actually think paying respect to what others are writing about Aaron Burr, kind of seeing a pattern with this man… My guy might not be immediately from India even if he was part of the Indian diaspora. So I think, yeah, again, allowing yourself to know that things change and they should. That's what history is, right? We're not textbooks. That stuff should be changing over time.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to know, you sort of talked about it briefly, but Brooklynite's emerged out of your work on a public history project. Could you just tell us a little more about the relationship between the two of them?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Yeah, absolutely. So mostly, very traditionally anyway, most people write a book, a scholar will write a book or a community historian or whoever will write a book and a museum will become interested in it. And of course, the museum cliche is always, we don't want to put the book on the wall, so we need to figure out the visual language around this. In Pursuit of Freedom, which was the public history project, which promised to tell the story of Brooklyn's free black community's antislavery movement never had a book. And that was partly to do with the way in which our discipline works and worked. I wouldn't say it's a concern anymore. In the last 10 years, scholarship on Brooklyn has been prolific. You can pick up a book on any theme, any time period of that borough, and there are brilliant people out there that have really broken down what its sort of uniqueness is or what that brand is or how it's different from Manhattan.
When we started this research back in 2010, there were some books, and I do not ever want to discount Craig Wilder's book, Covenant With Color was hugely, hugely important in sort of laying the framework for black people's presence in Brooklyn. There were also other community historians back in the seventies, Harold X Connolly and Robert Swan who were doing this work, this Dr. Joan Maynard, who will end up finding Weeksville Heritage Center, still exists today in Brooklyn. She was doing some research and trying to figure out what is the long history and black presence in Brooklyn. So it wasn't as though it was a complete blank slate, but just to say there was no coherent narrative, there was no, well, you tap that person and that is the expert on Brooklyn's nineteenth-century history. And here's what was happening to Brooklyn in terms of its development and here's what was happening in terms of its people. That book just did not exist. Gotham existed by Mike Wallace, but that is very Manhattan-centric.
And I would say until about the early 2000s, a lot of New York history existed, but again, it was Manhattan. It really did not give much love to the outer boroughs. So the reason the book didn't happen during the public history project is basically because… Well, I was trying to, I think, do too many things like most folks do on public history projects. We had promised funders and the public an exhibit, walking tours, an original theater production, K-through-12 curricula, there's still the website that exists. And I think by that point, I was just like, there's no time to write a book. It's not possible. And so the book has come at the end of not that public history project, but certainly the project's life cycle. And I am so keen and love talking about project life cycles, right?
A project life cycle through its own life history will have multiple audiences, multiple funders, might be hosted by different cultural organizations or different publishers, but there's a natural life cycle for it. So I feel as though this is another iteration of that project, but it's not the same. And which, again, because of time, which has been huge, I am much older, I have been able to have the most amazing conversations with CUNY, City University of New York students about what this history means today. I've been in dialogue with folks for much longer about the subject, it has lived in my head a lot longer. I am not at the mercy of funders and boards of trustees who want to see a certain kind of narrative for their museums. I'm emancipated in myself. So the book really is what I feel is true to the history of Brooklyn. So it is a much more, I would say, exciting narrative in my mind.
It centers black women as being folks who aren't in the archives, who don't get their flowers all the time because folks will read archives traditionally and say, well, there were no women, but I found the men. And if we don't have names for the women, then we can't celebrate them. And I think the joy, again, of being older, of not worrying about a tenure clock, of not worrying about am I pleasing the funders and the board of trustees, or am I pleasing… Who are I pleasing? Actually, I'm just pleasing general audiences who should know the story. Being able to write a much more nuanced narrative about unpacking what we do as historians, that we don't always have everything in the archives, but that we have great black feminist thinkers who help us think about what silences look like and how we still owe it to people from the past to honor them in our writing even if I don't have that particular census record that states she lived on so-and-so street, knowing that of course there would've been a black person or a woman that would've lived on that street holding down the community, inviting people over to her house, again, to organize and mobilize. I think it's been really magical in terms of writing.
Kate Carpenter:
You mentioned students, and I know that your home campus is a community college. How do you think about how that environment of teaching and working affects your writing?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
So I do, I teach at Bronx Community College. And I say that with such pride. There are so many different campuses within CUNY. BCC, Bronx Community College is the oldest community college in the CUNY system. It's also the first community college in the CUNY system. So it has a rich history in itself. I feel really honored every time I go onto that campus to be like we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Roscoe Brown was one of the presidents of that college, Romare Bearden was asked to talk at that college. This is not a college without its own history, but I think what it has done for me… Well, twofold. I don't want to make it all rainbows and unicorns. Teaching at a community college is hard, and I'll tell you why it's hard. The teaching load is hard. When I started, it was a five four teaching load, and that partly is a reason why Brooklynites took so long to write.
You cannot be lesson planning, curriculum planning, syllabus planning and teaching in a classroom, following up with 25, 30 students per class where you have their back, and I'm always like a huge cheerleader. I want every one of them to succeed and then go home and start writing. It's not feasible. So I think what I did, certainly for the first five to eight years of being tenure track, was, okay, I have to teach this survey course on US history, and I also teach the history of New York City and African-American history, and I acknowledge that these students might never become history majors, and for some of them, I am literally a block on which they have to get around in order to just get out of there and go do something amazing with their lives. So it really did become, again thinking as a public historian, how do I invite them in to think about why this history matters, the sort of, so what? I'm excited about… I found this woman, Mary Wilson, who owns her property store on Atlantic. How amazing is that?
Well, what's that got to do with somebody who needs to get to work after my class? What do they care? They live in the Bronx, and if you know New York City, people don't travel between boroughs. To be in the Bronx and think about Brooklyn, it's just like, why are you asking me to think about Pittsburgh? It is so alien that it doesn't happen. So I think what it did for my writing was, A, it improved my writing because all of a sudden I had an audience in which I was needing to make the connection, not necessarily for them, but invite them to the connection of past is present, and for me to become crystal clear about what that connection was. So not just me saying, well, black women's activism is important. Of course it's important, but why is it important? Who can I show as somebody, an ordinary person in my research that invites my student in, to really take that journey with me and to start thinking about the students' lived experiences as, honestly, they are the recipients of many of those systems of structural inequality and racism.
Many of those Bronx Community College students lived in neighborhoods that were redlined for decades and maybe don't formulate their neighborhoods in that way, that they know it was redlined and they can point out the map, but have a really sophisticated notion of structural inequality is what has impacted their lives, and that is what they're navigating. So I think in terms of thinking about my writing, it was, again, just honing in and becoming really clear that this is a story about the past, but it lives in our present. And I think there is no better audience than CUNY students for a start, but definitely our community college students who will challenge you in the most beautiful ways, make you question, why is this important to me? And I don't mean that in that kind of Gen Z, like, "So what? It's all about me," But as in, "Right, you are a historian, so you are excited about this. How are you going to invite me in to this narrative and have me understand why it's important to understanding the way in which I'm making life right now?"
Yeah. So I do say in the acknowledgements, even if the book is about Brooklyn, it's about the 19th century, it is about that amazing free black community that lived there and that mobilized. Honestly, my students' voices are throughout in thinking through a lot of the themes and why it should matter to any of us today.
Kate Carpenter:
One thing I really enjoy about the Brooklynites and that I think does invite people in is how much it has the feel of an exhibit still. There are primary sources with pull quotes, there are maps and images, even sort of breakdowns of how people know each other. How did you think about structuring the book when you were writing it?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Thank you so much for saying that, by the way, Kate, because that was intentional. I was like, I don't want ever people to feel like, oh, she didn't have anything to say, so she just put the whole archival source in there and never edited it. And I'm like, no, no, I did that on purpose. I know how to edit archival sources. I wanted that book to feel like somebody was buying a piece of Brooklyn, if that makes sense, without it sounding grossed and capitalistic. What I mean by that is, Brooklyn is such a brand now. As somebody who did not grow up in the city, I can tell you, when I go home to Liverpool, there are T-shirts with Brooklyn emblazoned across them like in H&M, right? In the most mainstream of stores. And you're like, what does that even mean? And so it was intentional twofold.
One was to have folks feel like I am buying a piece of Brooklyn's history. Here are the maps, here are the things people have written about Brooklyn. And then I have a narrator, which is me, hopefully guiding them through some of it, almost like a walking tour, right? We're going to stop here and then we're going to look at this, and here's what I have to tell you about the significance of this place. That was one intention, having it feel like it is very much on purpose for the public audiences very broadly defined. The other side of that was my educator brain, which is if you're going to make these lofty things in a classroom about, "Well, the reason people hate history is because you've been learning through textbooks, so I'm going to radicalize all of you. This is what a primary source is, let's analyze them." I was holding myself to account and I wanted to have that same ethos and value or quality in the book as well.
Meaning yes, I'm going to be doing a lot of interpretation and I am going to obviously navigate some of this, otherwise this book could end up being 800 pages, which nobody needs. But I do want to show you, here is the evidence, here is what exists in archives, which, no diss to archives and repositories anywhere, a lot of our archives and repositories rather in New York City are public, but can the public get to them? Well, that's a whole other question. If you're working so many hours a week, your first inclination is not going to be, I'm going to pop down to New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and pull out the archival collection of so-and-so. So it was very intentional. It was about bringing the archives in whole to the public and letting them read what has been written about Brooklyn and what they can find visually about Brooklyn in that time. And my toolkit in terms of narrative is I am a curator, I think, visually, and so if it feels sort of like an exhibit, I think that's because those are my parameters in terms of storytelling.
I'm like, okay, we've got the written stuff, we've got the visual stuff, and then I'm guiding them through as if it's a curatorial tour. And then the last bit was really… And it was like a twenty-year reawakening because I've not done playwriting since my mid-twenties. I'd never went professional with it, I ended up going into the dramaturgical side, but it was remembering I have this whole cast of characters and I want to celebrate every single one of those Brooklynites. But in terms of being able to read those stories and navigate those stories, you need to make some narrative choices. And so that is how I sort of fell upon, well, why don't we center it around families, both biological ones and chosen ones, and think about these families as not being ones that are exceptional or ones that they did something different to everybody else, but actually Prithi Kanakamedala has had to make a choice in who she is focusing on?
So here are four families that I'm going to sort of center these chapters around, but I'm inviting you to think about their neighbors, their extended families, their chosen families, and everybody else that's going to get mentioned. So yes, those were the sort of narrative choices in going into it.
Kate Carpenter:
To talk more concretely about how Prithi brought this history to life on the page, I asked her to read an excerpt from Brooklynites. For a little context, this excerpt comes from chapter five of the book, which opens by placing the reader on Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue, putting the historic development of the street in the context of what a present day viewer might see. Here's Dr. Prithi Kanakamedala reading from Brooklynites, the remarkable story of the free black communities that shaped a borough.
Prithi Kanakamedala:
In 1852, Atlantic was still two decades away from morphing into an avenue, but its radical transformation from dirt road, surrounded cornfields to busy thoroughfare in less than a decade provided new opportunities. That year, thirty-year-old Mary Wilson opened her crockery store at 66 Atlantic Street. Located in a fashionable shopping district, her store was in a busy area of the city with further commercial and industrial activity as you headed westward. Here along the waterfront, the smells and noises from the factory of the glass manufacturer, John L. Gilliant and Co, it would eventually become Corning, maker of Corningware, would've been familiar to Mary and her customers, and the South Ferry, which began shuttling passengers from Brooklyn's Atlantic to Manhattan's Whitehall Street in 1836, ensuring good foot traffic to the store. Given these factors, it is more than likely that Mary's store served Brooklynites and new Yorkers of all races and ethnicities.
As a crockery store owner, Mary was part of a long history of entrepreneurial Brooklynites fulfilling their neighbors every dining need crockery, particularly China, was a luxury of the rich, especially in demand by middle and upper middle class New Yorkers and Brooklynites in the mid 19th century. Today, New York City's archaeologists rely on crockery shards and their remnants long buried deep in the city's soil as a single most retrievable product in digs pieced together the lives of New Yorkers past. The nature of Mary's business and its prime location would've been lucrative for her and her family, which included her educator husband, William, and in 1852, their then eight-year-old daughter, Annie. But the existence of Mary's business also indicates the ways in which ordinary black women experience capitalism and patriarchy and how they navigated the city's changing political economy in their day-to-day lives. We know about Mary's store today because she is listed in the city directory for 1853, which was unusual even at that time.
Although the city directory follows contemporary naming conventions and lists her as Mrs. William J. Wilson with the usual asterisk to indicate race, these directories normally only captured heads of households, which also included widows. It rarely listed married women regardless of race, even less so business women, and even rarer than that, a black woman. But it is crucial to remind ourselves that rather than treating the exception as the norm, there were probably hundreds of black women just like Mary sustaining the city's economy in more informal ways. And while there might not be any written record of their commercial activities, they still deserve to be honored.
Kate Carpenter:
I chose this passage in part because I wanted to talk a little bit about archival challenges and recovering histories in a project like this. How did you go about finding the sources you needed to put this passage together?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Oh, gosh. Through a lot of hit and miss and through, I think, I know this is not something you are looking for, but time, right? Time, giving yourself time. That took me 14 years to write. And I don't mean the writing process, I mean actually trying to find the pieces to allow me to write that. I feel as though, and I was saying this to a colleague the other day, Truvo's done so much around Silences in the Archives that I feel as though everybody's talking about Silences in the Archives, and it's sort of nothing radical anymore, right? Yeah, okay, this Silences in the Archives, so what? And the so what has to become… For me as a writer, it has to be, and again, maybe this is my playwriting background, but I want readers to know what Mary Wilson's environment would've looked like. Meaning if they can imagine that they were walking down the street, what are the businesses they're seeing? Who are they passing on the street?
And so that means going into the census records and thinking about what is the racial and ethnic makeup of this street and of this neighborhood or ward, as they were called back in that day. What are the buildings that would've been on that street? And that's the reason for explaining the factories there. And then moving into your other senses and thinking about, well, if I don't have Mary's portrait so I can't tell the reader what she would've looked like, I can certainly tell the reader, when she's working in her store, what she might've heard, and to sort of give them a glimpse into the environment of Brooklyn at that time. Hence, I put the factory in because we all know factories are not quiet places, they're often loud, and they produce all sorts of environmental pollution, whether it be sound or gases. So having readers think about the visual, the audio.
And then my last one. Again, in thinking about, well, if I can't tell the reader what she looked like because I have no portrait, and I can't tell the reader what she sounded like because audio recordings were not a thing in 1852, maybe I can also invite the reader to think about what the city might've smelled like. So again, thinking about, if this sense is dulled, I can't see what Mary looks like, what might Mary have been smelling as she sat in her crockery store? China has a really particular kind of smell. When you buy new crockery, it's gorgeous. So just having folks think about, okay, I don't know when Mary's exact birthday was, but I can tell you when Mary was a business owner, this is who might have been walking into her shop. I can tell you, again, something that you might be of familiarity to you if you live in Brooklyn or New York, you know what Atlantic is, but let me invite you again to a time when Atlantic wasn't Atlantic Avenue, it wasn't [inaudible 00:38:55] and Trader Joe's, and it wasn't the BQE on the end, which always feels strange, but it was a strange mix of folks trying to figure out, how do we create business on this weird road that used to be a dirt road?
How do we make it that is one both for consumers and for wholesale consumption, and how do we learn to all live alongside each other? So again, in terms of primary sources, looking at maps, looking at atlases, looking at census records, looking at city directories, looking at… What else did we look at? Where did I look? Yeah, looking at are there any paintings, engravings of that particular area of Atlantic at that time. All of that went into the writing and the research. And again, the Corningware thing, that was just me Googling because I was like, well, what was this factory? I'm going to tell them there's a factory there. Again, thinking about my students and thinking about public audience. So what? So what there was a factory there? And what a gem it ended up being Corningware. And I was like, everybody knows what Corningware is, how gorgeous is that? Or maybe not gorgeous because it would've been loud and pollutant, but to think about these really ordinary items in our lives having been part of this really rich history.
Kate Carpenter:
Often narrative historians will do this thing where they find all of these details and facts, but then write a narrative in a way that presents them in a scene, and sort of, I don't want to say hide the evidence, it's not a tricky thing, but subsumes the evidence maybe. Whereas here, you've often chosen to really point out to the reader where your information is coming from and kind of take them into the sources with you. Why did you opt to present it that way?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Again, it was intentional. I think part of that is, going back to my early thirties self, never finding my voice in graduate school because I can't write in that way, but I always, and I'm so sorry, I know I've used this word throughout this sort of podcast, but the idea of invitation is so important to me that I am in community with who I'm writing for and with. So the reason for explaining how the archival process works, the research process works, was, I think, an echo or a mirror of myself as an educator. I never want students to feel that there's some kind of mystery around what we do as historians. There's not. There's a craft around it, and I'm happy to share the craft with folks. And I think it was also to kind of be a blueprint because I would love somebody five, 10, 20 years from now to write the ongoing narrative of Brooklynites.
I finished kind of in 1865. I have a little bit about reconstruction, but you can tell the book is coming to an end, but that there's enough nuggets in there, and it doesn't just follow that footnote system that we're all trained to do, to be like, "I went to… Here's my clue." If it was an episode of Colombo, "Here's where I went. I went to Yale, I ordered this file everyone, and this is what's in the file," So that somebody else can say, oh, look, on page whatever, she said she went to that archive already so maybe we need to order a different folder in that archive, or whatever it is. I think it is to demystify some of what we do as historians, but also, like I keep saying, hopefully somebody will take the nugget and run with it. I think you and I both know people do footnotes all the time, and I think what I adore about the humanness of us as scholars is sometimes those footnotes are really wrong.
You look at a footnote and be like, "That's not at that repository," Or, "That's not the page number for what you're writing about, but okay." We're humans. Most people write their footnotes at the end and they're very tired. So I think this was a way of pulling it out of literally the end note footnote and putting it into the narrative and saying, here is how we're doing this work.
Kate Carpenter:
You also have this really moving note in your acknowledgements where you talk about the black families who have really worked to preserve and share these histories, even as they've often been excluded either intentionally or unintentionally from traditional archives. When you're thinking about yourself as a historian, how do you think about yourself in relation to those families?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Absolutely. Always in dialogue and respect. I am very intentional about expertise and the ways in which expertise works. Anybody that attends one of my talks will know the bit that I sort of don't like the most is where I'm at the lectern and I am the expert and I'm going to tell the story. The bit that I love the most is when I get out behind that podium and I actually get to be in dialogue with folks. And the reason for saying that is it really was. It was to honor all of the non-traditional archives and archivists that have long existed not just in Brooklyn, but in several cities across the world, who are archiving their own family histories, who are doing the work of formal librarians and archivists and historians. And so I think my goal or my aim for myself is always to say the work means nothing if it's not in dialogue with the very people who you're honoring and their descendants.
The work falls flat for me. If it is not for them and it's just about them, then the work has failed entirely as a piece of research and as a piece of historical narrative. And so yeah, absolutely in dialogue. They have, some of those descendants, the only reason this work can happen is because they preserve their archives and they gave them to repositories. So thinking about the ways in which we break down that hierarchical system, but actually think about history as being one in community I think is very important to me.
Kate Carpenter:
As we wrap up here, I want to talk a little bit about your own influences and inspirations. First I'd like to ask what some of the most influential writing advice is that you've ever gotten?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
It was influential, but it doesn't mean I sort of did it, but it was influential. I read prolifically, and I think I do that because all writers say good writers are readers, they're good readers. They've read other people's stuff. So that is something I live by. I read a lot, even when I'm tired. The writing part I don't do necessarily, I write as practice, but the reading, absolutely. And again, I didn't practice this, as I said at the top, but it really is true. The more you write, the easier it becomes. I write emails every day, and I can write those emails within seconds now because I'm just so good at it. I can smash them out. Writing really does become significantly easier when you are doing it as a practice, and that's just the truth. And it sucks for the rest of us who don't have the luxury of being full-time writers, but it's so true.
And again, it's not quite what you ask, but I really do think writers talk about it all the time, fiction writers, nonfiction writers. I think it's about listening to the past. And I really feel quite strongly. I say it here, I am also at CUNY Graduate Center all the time to graduate students, about acknowledging who came before us. It's so crucial. And that might be called historiography if you're a historian, or it might be called a lit review if you're something else. But that practice for me, especially as I get older, needs to become so much more deeper than, "Here's all the folks that have written about this topic, and here is my intervention," Which is that classic neoliberal, western higher ed model of graduate education. But it's so much deeper. Here are all the folks that make my work possible because they wrote about that. Even if they didn't write about that one thing that I'm going to run with, I wouldn't be able to do any of this work without them.
And I think listening to the past and honoring ancestors… And I don't mean that in a sort of, I don't know, again, unicorns and rainbows way, but even honoring scholars who have come before you I think is huge and it influences the way in which you write at that point.
Kate Carpenter:
You mentioned being a prolific reader, which I think is always a good idea for writers. Are there specific people you really turn to for inspiration for your writing?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Yes, and it's a mix of traditional scholarship, but also I read fiction. I love reading fiction. I love writers who really understand the porous nature of fiction and nonfiction. So anything by my colleague and friend, Kaitlyn Greenidge. I love Caitlin's work. My CUNY colleague, Johanna Fernandez, the Young Lords book that she wrote, I was like, yes, this is the blueprint. Anything that my, again, CUNY colleague, senior CUNY colleague who I greatly admire and respect, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Anything they sort of write, I'm there. I'll be the first one to purchase or be in line to listen to the public programming that comes out around it. But really, I don't know, I just love consuming stuff about New York City's history in general. So although I said I was a prolific reader, I also love going on the walking tours. The ways in which [inaudible 00:48:45] for black Gotham experience will construct narratives, which of course come out of thinking about the script and writing. All of it. I just love the city and I just am a huge consumer of anything that's written about this city.
Kate Carpenter:
Before I let you go, I know you were in the midst of celebrating and talking about Brooklynites and this end of the life cycle of the project, which I think is wonderful. You also strike me as a person who has a lot of different projects maybe in the works often. Are there other things you're working on that you'd like to talk about a little bit?
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Oh, thank you so much, Kate, that's so kind of you to ask because yeah, there is a couple of others, but I do not want folks to feel like, "Oh, she's prolific. She has all these great projects." I'm like, "No, nothing's been written. It's all up here in the brain at the moment." I clearly was not born or brought up in the United States, I came here as a young adult, but I would love to return to where I was born and brought up, which is Liverpool. I grew up in the National Health Service. I grew up in a hospital. My dad was a doctor, and we grew up in hospital accommodation. And of course, I always thought it was normal and have always talked about it, and I realize as I get older what a, not necessarily, unique but different experience that was as a child. So I think returning…
I trained in Atlantic studies. I was never an Americanist. So I think returning back home literally and figuratively, and thinking about how do you write a social history of how that even came to be. So you're writing about the National Health Service, you're talking about de-industrialization and what it means to have been a young Desi family growing up in a hospital. So your neighbors were literally like geriatric patients, and that's who I would hang out with. So that is definitely one project. And as I mentioned, I'm returning to George DeGrasse because I know I have got all of his history wrong. And to revisit that, I think, and just tease out what are some of the more common histories that we all have when it comes to his story.
Kate Carpenter:
Those sound wonderful. I can't wait to see what you are working on in the future. Dr. Prithi Kanakamedala, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting The Past.
Prithi Kanakamedala:
Oh, thank you so much, Kate. These were amazing questions and I'm just so grateful. Thank you.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting The Past. You can find a link to Prithi's book and the other books mentioned in this episode at draftingthepast.com. Drafting The Past is created and produced by me, Kate Carpenter. And if you get as much out of these conversations as I do, please consider making a donation at patreon.com slash draftingthepast or leaving a review on your favorite podcast app. Your support makes all the difference in keeping this conversation going. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
