Priya Kandaswamy on Embracing Permanent Change

Cathy Hannabach: Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining otherwise. I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach.

[00:00:23] We’ve all experienced a lot of change over the past year and a half. Many of the things we assumed to be stable anchors suddenly turned out not to be, as everything from the global economy and education to politics and media were irrevocably transformed.

[00:00:39] Many with privilege have responded to such upheaval by demanding a swift and complete return to the same capitalist normal that unevenly organized life in the “before times.”

[00:00:50] But those for whom the old normal was a source of oppression rather than comfort have had a rather different reaction to such changes. Folks have instead invested in practices like mutual aid, unlearning, and interdependency, all of which provide models for more just social foundations.

[00:01:07] My guest on the show today is gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies scholar and professor Priya Kandaswamy. Priya has long been fascinated with how institutions and individuals shape and reshape one another in the context of power.

[00:01:22] As she details in our conversation, Priya’s career shifted dramatically earlier this year. In March, 2021, one full year after COVID-19 had forced major shutdowns across the US, Priya’s employer Mills College, announced that fall 2021 would be its last year admitting new students and the beloved liberal arts college in Oakland, California, would completely close by 2023. As a result, all faculty and staff would this need to find other employment.

[00:01:54] Priya shares how personal upheavals (like a career change) combined with collective upheavals (like a pandemic) provide glimpses into a new normal—one that is organized around permanent change.

[00:02:07] Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as prison abolition movements, radical herbalism, feminist of color welfare histories, and the mycorrhizal bonds between trees and fungi, Priya explains how she is learning to embrace permanent transformation as a way to individually and collectively build new worlds.

[00:02:27] Thank you so much for being with us today.

[00:02:29] Priya Kandaswamy: Thank you, Cathy. I’m really excited to be here.

[00:02:33] Cathy Hannabach: I was really excited to have you on the show to talk about transformation. This is a topic that we’re exploring this month at Ideas on Fire, and it’s one that I think all of us have experienced quite a lot of over the past year and a half of what is an ongoing global pandemic.

[00:02:49] I know that you’ve experienced some pretty big professional transformations quite recently as well. To kick off our conversation today, I’d love to know how is transformation showing up for you these days in your various projects.

[00:03:03] Priya Kandaswamy: This is such a great question. I think about my life today and it is so much different from how it was a year and a half ago. It’s hard to even … I think that it’ll take a while actually for my thinking to catch up with all of the changes that have happened.

[00:03:24] But I suppose the biggest way that transformation has shown up for me, or been forced upon me is that a few months ago, in March, the college that I had worked at for 11 years, Mills College, announced that it would be closing as a degree granting institution in 2023.

[00:03:46] It was a Wednesday morning in March. I got up in the morning and I checked my email and there was an email that was sent to all faculty and staff that informed us of this news. And then a couple hours later, the same email was sent to students. It was all very sudden.

[00:04:04] Mills had a lot of financial difficulties for a long time and so we all knew that the financial situation wasn’t great. But we didn’t really, I think, fully grasp or understand that closing the college was something that was on the table even, and certainly not that it was going to happen now.

[00:04:25] That whole process was a little bit like getting the floor pulled out from under you. I guess it guess sparked a lot of transformation, both in a really difficult and challenging way and also in a way that I think maybe opened up some space for other possibilities or potential for me personally.

[00:04:48] The college closing, or whatever is going to happen to the college in the next few years, is a hard thing to talk about because it all feels so uncertain. But I think what it provoked for everyone was having to really reckon with the things that you think about as stable anchors in your life really are not stable and can be pulled away pretty suddenly.

[00:05:18] For me, as I think for a lot of people, the first impulse is to fight back and to try to keep the thing that you’re losing, which I think is a really important and worthy struggle, particularly as we think about the landscape of higher education these days.

[00:05:37] But I also found that I really had to grapple with a lot of loss, anger, grief, and really think about the way that my work and my career weren’t really available to me anymore. It was being taken away from me without my consent. And that was really hard. I think that’s something that I’m really still grappling with.

[00:06:05] But one of the things that happened out of that is that I started looking for another job. I think I was really lucky in the sense that some really interesting opportunities opened up for me pretty quickly. So I’m actually going to be starting as the academic program director at Mount Tamalpais College in a few weeks.

[00:06:26] Mount Tamalpais College is a community college program that exclusively serves incarcerated students at San Quentin Prison here in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a really exciting opportunity for me because I’m going to get to use all of the things I have been learning and thinking about in relation to teaching and learning in this very different context.

[00:06:50] I’m really excited to get to build relationships with incarcerated people and to really think through some of the very complicated questions that arise when we think about it abolition and its relationship to prison education. So I think it’s a really exciting opportunity for me. I’m really happy to be doing it.

[00:07:10] It was also a really difficult choice because I think for me, it’s like leaving something that I know, leaving something that I’d done for a really long time, leaving a particular way of thinking about my work and my career, leaving tenure, which I guess doesn’t really mean a whole lot when your college says it’s closing. But still leaving all of those sorts of ways of thinking about academic work and trying to create a different way of doing that in a really different context.

[00:07:36] It’s something that’s really exciting for me and something I’m really curious about. And I think a lot of the choice to lean into that kind of change comes from a desire to keep learning and to do new things. It expands and grows the ways that I can think about things or the ways that I can use my skills, but it’s not a transformation that I would have ever imagined for myself a year ago and it’s something that I’m really excited to see how it pans out over the next few years. I really have no idea two years from now what I’m going to say about the work. I think that, to me, is really exciting.

[00:08:18] Cathy Hannabach: I think that feeling of I never could have imagined doing this or having this experience a year prior to this is a common experience.

[00:08:28] I mean, your experience is very specific, about Mills. And we know about the history of Mills and the role that Mills has played in the Bay Area. But I’ve talked to so many guests on the show during the pandemic over the past year and a half who have had their relationship to change completely overhauled through things that are far beyond any of our control.

[00:08:52] For some folks, it means not taking things for granted on an interpersonal level or overhauling how entire social movements are organized or organizations are put together on a collective level.

[00:09:07] What kind of lessons about change have you learned from this past year and a half that you want to take forward into the future?

[00:09:18] Priya Kandaswamy: One of the things that I have thought about a lot during the pandemic, is that I think as people who are invested in social change, we think a lot about the future. But at the same time, a lot of the ways we live, a lot of our orientation to ourselves and the people around us, a lot of the work we do presumes that the future will, in some ways, be like the present. I think a lot of, for example, our cultural forms lead us to think this way.

[00:09:56] There is this really wonderful book by Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement. She talks about how, for example, the cultural form of the novel is centered around this individual who makes all of these decisions and the world is essentially just backdrop. The world isn’t an actor in that context.

[00:10:21] I think one of the things that we all learned in the context of the pandemic is that the world is definitely an actor in our lives and shapes the ways that we might be able to live in particular contexts.

[00:10:35] So I think one of the biggest lessons about change that I am learning is to actually start to embrace the idea that the future won’t be like the present. That you can’t expect the kind of stability that we’re often taught to strive for, that a lot of the things that we assume will always be there maybe won’t always be there. And what does that mean both in terms of how we live our lives in the present and also what we then need to do to create the future that we want to see?

[00:11:18] For example, I think a lot of us have the experience during the pandemic of teaching. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic having conversation with a friend and being like, I never thought that when the apocalypse came, my biggest concern would be how to do my job. That seemed really funny to me that we were all trying to go to work and accomplish the tasks that we had to accomplish before in this context where everything was changing.

[00:11:51] I’m thinking about that as a teacher and watching my students try to do that too, try to be present in class, try to do their work as they had done before, even though like things weren’t the same as they were before. It really made me think about, for example, when we’re teaching, what does it mean to teach?

[00:12:13] What does it mean to teach in a context that embraces both the lived reality of change and also the possibilities that might be inherent in change? I think one of the things I kept coming back to is moving away from a view of teaching as I have to cover all of this material or I have to make sure that my students know all of these things to instead thinking about what is it that we all need to know now. What is it that we need to be thinking about now?

[00:12:52] If change is our reality, how do we be prepared for that change? What skills do we have to have to be prepared for that change? What ideas can we build on or use as conceptual tools to help us think through change or help us figure out how we want to, like Octavia Butler in The Parable of the Sower talks about this idea of crafting change? How do you actually think about something like teaching as a way of engaging in these long, sustained conversations about how we like craft change in the world that we currently live in?

[00:13:35] Cathy Hannabach: One really exciting change that you’re also reckoning with right now is the publication of your really amazing book, which Ideas on Fire was privileged to work with you on and I’m very excited to see out in the world. It’s called Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform.

[00:13:55] I’m noticing it already getting quite a buzz among certain fields, which is really exciting. For folks who are new to the book, can you tell us what is that book all about and what got you interested in writing it?

[00:14:09] Priya Kandaswamy: Sure. Well, thank you. It was really wonderful to get to work with Ideas on Fire for the book too. I really enjoyed that piece of the process.

[00:14:17] So the book is an intervention or maybe a way of adding to feminist histories of the welfare state that tend to begin in the Progressive Era, so in the 1910s, 1920s, and emphasize the ways that women’s citizenship has been defined through ideas of domesticity that tend to focus on keeping women in the home and defining their contributions as citizens through their roles as mothers.

[00:14:46] In the book, I try not really say that that history is wrong but to particularize it to the experiences of white women and suggest that maybe there’s a different way of thinking about that history when we center the experiences that Black women have had with the welfare state. I think a lot of the history positions that are coming after the Progressive Era, really being something that happens in the Civil Rights or post-Civil Rights era, but really thinking about the history of Black women with the state as kind of a way, of something that’s really foundational to how the welfare state develops historically in the United States.

[00:15:28] The book highlights the ways that the Freedmen’s Bureau, and its efforts to make formerly enslaved people into citizens, employed gender in ways that were much more contradictory than what those histories of the Progressive Era maternalistic movements suggest. For example, while the idea of marriage and motherhood was really rhetorically important in defining what it would mean for Black women to become citizens in the Reconstruction Era, the compulsion that Black women continue to work outside their homes after Emancipation was also a defining feature of how the Bureau defined gendered citizenship for Black women.

[00:16:10] In this, I see a lot of parallels to the 1996 welfare reform law, which if folks are familiar with, I think one of the things that really resonates from that law is this language of family values and this emphasis on marriage and a heteronormative family being really central to the health of the American nation.

[00:16:34] But that within that law, a lot of what the law is actually doing is forcing women who receive welfare benefits to work outside the home, this contradiction. For me, that contradiction is really similar to what you see happening in the Reconstruction Era. And so a lot of what the book does is explore those parallels.

[00:16:59] I think theoretically, the book focuses on the relationship between the heteronormative family and the exercise of state power. I’m really interested in the ways that using the heteronormative family both as a discursive tactic and also as a material structure enables tremendous stratification in the welfare state.

[00:17:25] One of the things that book really tries to show over the history it presents is how the family for white families historically served as a claim to a set of entitlements, whether that be a claim to a right to privacy or a right to a family wage or a right to federally insured mortgages with the New Deal. White families were able to use this idea of family as a way of getting resources from the state.

[00:17:59] But for Black families, historically, the idea of the family has been a source of obligation and privatization. So in this time period during Reconstruction, what you really see is that the language of family gets employed to try to enforce these gendered subjectivities that essentially necessitate that Black families provide for themselves or be self-sufficient. You really get this like idea in which the family becomes this vehicle through which the harms and violences of slavery get privatized onto the family. The family becomes a source of obligation.

[00:18:40] In this period, Black women are consistently being asked to demonstrate their deservingness by performing these familial roles that are often impossible for them to perform, given the material circumstances that they live in.

[00:18:56] I really want to show this kind of double meaning of the family as a way of building on or expanding critiques of heteronormativity to emphasize how it operates as a structure that enables racial stratification and also to locate welfare politics and the welfare state firmly within the terrain of queer politics as well.

[00:19:23] I got interested in this project in a lot of different ways. I grew up in the Reagan era and so this idea of the welfare queen was something that was really ubiquitous to me and also really confusing because the welfare queen, as a symbol or as a story, is something that people really buy into. And it’s also something that doesn’t make any sense.

[00:19:52] I’ve always been interested in why, as a society, we collectively buy into things that like are just seemingly ridiculous, like the idea that someone would have an additional child in order to make a couple hundred dollars a month on a welfare check. That just doesn’t make any sense at all to anyone who has ever had a child or been around a child or has any experience with children. That just seems totally completely ridiculous. And yet at the same time, it becomes this cultural icon that has so much force in how politics is shaped. So my interest in the project really stemmed from that kind of question.

[00:20:37] I’ve always been really curious about why people in the United States hate welfare so much, especially when it seems to me that for most of us, having a really generous system of social welfare provision would be a good thing.

[00:20:51] We live in a country with tremendous inequality. Even those of us who might feel somewhat financially secure are always only one big financial crisis away from extreme poverty. So it would seem that people should collectively want to have an expansive, generous, redistributive welfare state. And yet, historically that hasn’t been the case. So for me, that was the question that really drove the project.

[00:21:25] I’m particularly trying to understand the way in which a fixation with Black women’s bodies as signs of excess or signs of the harm that a generous welfare state might produce become really intricately connected to that hatred.

[00:21:47] The project, in many ways, is a historical project, but it’s really that question that drove me to the history and made me really want to think seriously about it. Turning to a different time period might help us think more critically about the way that politics around welfare are framed today.

[00:22:09] Cathy Hannabach: You talk about, in the book, the process of telling history as a non-historian, tracing these genealogies and providing alternative genealogies to the ones that we tend to hear but from an interdisciplinary perspective. And I think you achieve this really beautifully.

[00:22:28] I’m curious how that interdisciplinary lens or that interdisciplinary training helped you tell this historical story. How did it help you tell the story differently.

[00:22:40] Priya Kandaswamy: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think so. I’m not a historian by training. My background is in the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic studies and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Obviously history has been really fundamental to both of those fields. So it’s not like I don’t have any orientation towards history, but I’m certainly not a disciplinary historian and much of the work that I did prior to this book was not historical. Much of my other scholarship is much more in the intersecting terrain of cultural studies, political theory, and sociology. Not necessarily historical work.

[00:23:24] I think what my interdisciplinary training really helped me see or the way that I was trained interdisciplinarily led me to have the questions that I was asking really drive my approach. I didn’t start the book as like, I want to write a history. I started the book as like, I’m really captivated by a question. And in order to answer this question, I think what I need to do is look at history.

[00:23:55] For me, interdisciplinary training, the gift of it is that we make the methods that answer our own questions. The question is what drives the method. And I think that that’s a really important scholarly approach.

[00:24:18] For me, doing history was also like, it’s funny or ironic that I was very anxious and nervous about going to an archive and learning how to do history and whether or not, because I’m not really a historian, do I even have a right to do that? Or was I going to be able to do that? Was I always doing it wrong? I had a lot of anxiety about those things.

[00:24:44] I think it’s interesting because now when I look back at the book, the parts of it that, to me, feel the most important or feel the most developed or the most significant contribution are the historical stories. And maybe that’s partly the overcompensation of really feeling insecure about something.

[00:25:10] But I also think, in terms of being trained interdisciplinarily, one of the things that that led to is a sense of you can’t really take historical evidence for granted. So I really wanted to be really rigorous about thinking through what historical evidence can prove and also what it can’t prove and really make space to recognize both of those things.

[00:25:43] You know, there were a lot of tensions around doing the history. I use archival sources, that are largely records of the state, to tell a story about the state. It was really clear that the evidence in the archives was evidence about the state. It wasn’t evidence about the people being talked about. But it was also important to recognize the ways that traces of people’s stories were still in the archive.

[00:26:15] While you can’t, I think, reconstruct a person’s story from what a state official says about them, you also can try to navigate the very complicated process of giving people humanity in these really dehumanizing contexts. That was also something for me that was really important.

In the chapter of the book that deals with forced domestic labor, there is a series of stories about different ways that newly emancipated Black women were forced into domestic work, some of them in the homes of white people in the North. Some of those stories were just absolutely heartbreaking to me. I think the fact that they are stories that aren’t recorded and haven’t been told and people whose lives aren’t being thought about, it did take on a lot of importance then to be able to make space for their stories in some way in the book.

[00:27:27] Even if what is in the archive couldn’t tell me much about the person, it was important to me to be able to engage with the ways that these policies and practices I was writing about have impacts on real people and that those impacts are important because of violence, the tremendous violence, that they did to these women’s lives. That violence is something that we do need to think about and that we do need to recognize.

[00:28:01] Cathy Hannabach: So this brings me to the question that I like to close out every conversation on this show with, which gets at that version of a better world that you’re working toward when you write books like this, when you overcome that anxiety and you go into the archive and you try to do justice to these past historical figures who we just get glimpses of in state records, when you teach your classes, when you teach new kinds of classes like I know you’re about to start.

[00:28:30] So I’ll ask you this giant question: what is the world that you’re working toward? What kind of world do you want?

[00:28:38] Priya Kandaswamy: This is a really important question and it’s a really hard question.

[00:28:41] Cathy Hannabach: It is. It’s so hard.

[00:28:44] Priya Kandaswamy: We should all just, probably we would live in a better world if we actually all just spent a lot of time thinking about this questions. And there’s a couple ways I would answer it.

[00:28:53] I think my first reaction or my first response to it is I’m working toward a world without prisons, without borders, without policing.

[00:29:03] A world where people have what they need and are given the space and time to become who they want to become, to live in beautiful ways, to use their imagination, to be in good relationships with each other and the natural world. All of those kinds of things that I’m guessing probably a lot of people might say, or at least a lot of the people who you talk to on your podcast might say.

[00:29:29] But a lot of those things often feel kind of abstract to me. Sometimes I think about those things as what José Esteban Muñoz talks about as queer horizon. For me, those things are the horizon that I like want to keep my eyes on but also I can’t really like see or necessarily know a lot of detail because it’s not here yet. It’s something that we have to create in world together. It’s not something that as an individual, I can say, this is what that is.

[00:30:06] In a more everyday way, a lot of my work is about the relationship between the state and subjectivity or the kinds of subjectivity that we’re allowed to have.

[00:30:23] A lot of scholars—the big names that are jumping out at me right now are [Karl] Marx or [Frantz] Fanon—have talked about the ways that the structures we live in shape the kinds of subjects that we are, that we can be. Also, as we change the world, we also change our subjectivity.

[00:30:46] And in changing our subjectivities, we open up these new possibilities for what the world could look like. There’s this kind of reciprocal relationship between becoming different kinds people or different kinds of subjects and creating a different kind of world. And I’m really interested in that relationship.

[00:31:10] I think the idea that I always come back to is the idea of interdependency. In this book, a lot of what the book is about is how these gendered ideas of subjectivity that rely on concepts of independence or dependence work to narrow and constrain how we conceptualize freedom.

[00:31:33] I’m really interested in thinking through, embracing, and cultivating different kinds of interdependency. I’m also trying to think about what do subjectivities that aren’t trying to suppress or ignore interdependency but rather lean into them, embrace them, really understand what does it mean to see yourself in ways that like you might recognize yourself as an individual, but you might also recognize yourself as fundamentally interdependent with all these other kinds of life. I’m really interested in what that would look like. I think that’s really connected to the world that I want to see.

[00:32:20] One of the things I sort of think a lot about are plants. I’m a really big plant nerd. And one of the things that I have done over the past couple of years is I’ve started studying herbalism with a school called Ancestral Apothecary, which is a school here in Oakland that grounds learning about healing through plants in the ancestral traditions of BIPOC communities.

[00:32:46] One of the things that that work has always really emphasized for me is finding ways of learning and being in relationship with life that are not kind of commodified. So thinking about when we think about plants, for example, we might see a tree and think about the tree as an independent, freestanding tree. But in actuality, the tree is embedded all of these mycelial networks that connect the tree to other trees or to other plants.

[00:33:30] The distinctions, when we start to think about life that way, between different forms of life become really porous and start to become really difficult to define. So when we think about a tree, it has its own sort of individuality and its own sort of beingness, but it also is inseparable from a larger system of life. I think that that’s a really interesting model for us to think about how we might live in the world or make a world that is about cultivating and respecting life in all of its different forms of diversity and things that really emphasize that transformation has to be about cultivating interconnection and building relationships.

[00:34:20] Cathy Hannabach: Thank you so much for being with us today and sharing all the ways that you imagine otherwise.

[00:34:26] Priya Kandaswamy: Thank you. It was great to talk to you.

[00:34:32] Cathy Hannabach: Thanks for listening to another episode of Imagine Otherwise. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire and this episode was created by Christopher Persaud and myself, Cathy Hannabach. Audio editing was provided by the awesome folks at Pro Podcast Solutions.

[00:34:47] You can check out the show notes and transcript for this episode on our website at https://ideasonfire.net/, where you can also read about our fabulous guest and find links to the people and projects we discussed on the show.