Scholar Spotlight: Prithi Kanakamedala F’21

In a new video interview with ACLS, Prithi Kanakamedala F’21 discusses her research on Brooklyn abolitionists, her fellowship experience, and her forthcoming book Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough (NYU Press, 2024).

Kanakamedala is an Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College CUNY and a 2021 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow. The Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship Program ran from 2019-2022, recognizing the vital contributions to scholarship, teaching, and local communities made by humanities and interpretive social science faculty who teach at two-year institutions.

Watch the interview and read the transcript below.

About the Project “Brooklyn Abolitionists”

“‘Brooklyn Abolitionists’ has been a public history project since about 2010, way before I began my career at CUNY and before I got involved with Mellon and ACLS. It was stewarded by three cultural organizations: the Brooklyn Historical Society, which is now part of Brooklyn Public Library, Weeksville Heritage Center, and Irondale Ensemble Project. I worked as the historian for this public history project, and the goal was to tell the undertold story of Brooklyn’s past. Brooklyn was its own independent city until 1898, and [the project] was to look at the free Black communities and the anti-slavery movement that had really shaped the city.

During that project, we created exhibits, walking tours, K-12 curricula, and an original theater production and a website. But what never happened was the scholarly book that should have come out of it. During that time period, I became a full-time faculty member here at Bronx Community College. So I think between teaching classes, doing smaller amounts of scholarship, and other types of service, the book just never happened for whatever reason. So really I would say this is its second life in terms of Brooklyn abolitionists, the book itself. I’m so grateful to Mellon and ACLS for allowing it to have a second life and really seeing something that people, certainly in Brooklyn, want to see. When I talk at public programs, at cultural organizations, they’re always saying, ‘Where’s the book?’ I feel like this has finally been allowed to happen.”

Brooklynites: the Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities That Shaped a Borough

“The book, which is out in September 2024, will be called Brooklynites: the Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities That Shaped a Borough. But at the heart of it, the story is still the same. It is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, how they organized and mobilized to really shape their city and address some of the real structural inequality and racism that existed in the city and still exists in the city today. So thinking about the lessons from the past and how we can learn from them now in the present, but also I think what readers can see that’s new in the book is I’ve absolutely centered Black women in this history. And I think it’s crucial. Most of the archives don’t preserve Black women’s history, especially in the 19th century in the same way. So you’re constantly reading against the archive. I’m inviting readers in to think about Black women whose names we may never know, but they were very much residents of Brooklyn at the center of organizing and of social justice movements.”

Impact of her Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship

“The book Brooklynites does contain a lot more original research, and that was only made possible by the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship. I was able to go back into the archives to really piece together in minute detail what these streets would’ve looked like. And I was keen to do that because a lot of the traditional archives that you would look at, such as census records, maps, or city directories, didn’t have that kind of information in which Black women are centered in the 19th century.

So I do think of ACLS as collaborators on this project. Had they not funded it, I wouldn’t have had the time to have done the research, which takes ages when it’s historical research. You can spend days, weeks, months in an archive, find nothing, and then one day you’ll just come across the golden ticket. So thinking of ACLS as collaborators always, just so respectful and flexible, especially when you’re a committed public educator like I am. We’re always under-resourced here in public education in New York City. I think they were extremely kind in being flexible with time, about when money was sent over to either the institution or myself. There’s resources that I don’t have, that I might have in an R1, such as Census records. There’s a very famous database that is freely available at R1 institutions that I had to pay for out of pocket. As a scholar, as somebody who does historical search, which is slow and painful, just really respectful of how long that takes.”