Saint Heron

We need new pedagogies. Sister Lorde warned us about the limits of the master's tools, so we must interrogate them: the discourses and indoctrinating apparatuses that founded Western thought. In 2016, Kandis Williams established CASSANDRA Press as an expansive, revelatory repository of those tools: the empirical evidence of empire, patriarchy, caste, and the predominant philosophies that pervade democracy. With digital and print publications and supplemental coursework facilitated by notable scholars, organizers, and industry professionals, CASSANDRA Press interrogates the singularizing silos produced by academic discourses; that is, erasure by limited querying and division vulgar specificity. CASSANDRA Press understands the destructive tendency of academic disciplines to endorse subjectivity even as stewards of those disciplines claim neutrality. Their practice of narrow investigation implicates all disciplines.

I’m reminded of the Greco-Roman archetypal woman, Cassandra, who is tragically cursed by Apollo to bear prophetic visions that are never believed. Apollo is white supremacy. Apollo is corrupt policing and state-sanctioned violence. Apollo is the unjust justice system, the patriarchy. Like many prophets, the Black woman’s imposed fate and martyrdom are believed – even after her death – to be justified effects of her own cause. Williams' publication should be named a symbolic reproach to the tragedy of Cassandra. Black women are rarely believed.

CASSANDRA Press's prolific references – critical essays, pop-cultural references, and plays – each function as recalibrating appliances, rebellious sociological reviews, and offerings that compel readers to arm themselves with the theories that have been used to, both, elevate and imprison us. The archetypes that define performances of gender, sexuality and race proliferate the pedagogies ingrained within us. These outdated constructs do not serve us well. Only through thorough investigations of the subtle and overt fortification of anti-Black sentiments, policies, practices, and legislation can we begin to heal and evolve our collective cultural imaginings.

AC: What inspired you to establish The Press and the CASSANDRA Classrooms?

KW: The Press was inspired by coming back to the States in 2016. I lived in Germany for about twelve years and basically finished my art education in France. I left the U.S. when I was nineteen, and coming back, it's just so much worse. I don't know how it could be worse than the America that ran me out long ago, but it was. It was just this dark feeling; especially coming from Germany and having lived in that shell of a post-fascist government, and having seen the destruction of a fascist government on the people, the emotions of guilt, fear, rage.

There's just so much that felt like it required urgent attention, and I had this library of materials that I'd collected over the years from being able to be in Europe in higher educational institutions. And then also with time. I had time and space and energy where I had been very much privately in my studio and collage practice, making readers and making assemblages of text with my images. And this was my thinking when I was in Europe: I would bring these texts to openings or bring these texts to group shows of my artwork so that I wouldn't be the only Black person in the room.

[laughter]

We don't really recognize that our history has given shape to so much aesthetic content. We think of ourselves as parasitically related to all these industries, but we're generating all these industries from sports to entertainment, and so much of the modern theoretical stage and theater comes out of the Black experience. So, thinking about Blackness as a technology too, I felt like founding The Press was a way of opening up my practice for more collaboration with other Black theorists. Also, just having protected space and dedicated space [for] Black thought and Black ideation. The Press is run only by Black people now because we share the same time and urgency. I've gotten to work with amazing Black theorists, from Calvin Warren to Amanda Williams. Theorists like Denise da Silva Ferreira, Hortense Spillers, even Fred Moten, and W. E. B. DuBois.

KW: You used to have to DM me to order books, basically. It was very personal. And that's still something we play around with, creating value through new discourse. We test organizations and institutions. We challenge them to help us build our value versus ban or be exploited by those institutions or organizations. If it's Black students [or] Black scholars who have interest, we've donated and really tried to get them the learning materials that they need for free, or for an extremely reduced cost, or just the cost of printing them. Now it's even more so the case because we've opened up the CASSANDRA Classrooms. I started planning in January [2019] how to start doing the classrooms. And with the uprising, that energy just felt so necessary to have Black intellectual thinkers, not also doing anything for free. Really getting to forefront people like Manuel Abreu's "Alternative History of Abstraction," getting to include Rhea Dillon as a professor – a very young Black filmmaker in London – to this wide audience of other filmmakers from all over the world for the ontic and ontological class. Ebony [L. Haynes]’s Black Student sessions are full within hours of posting them, and she’s carrying so many new relationships to emerging Black artists in a time that intimacy is so deeply needed. My own classes have been extremely philosophical, theoretical and media-based. It's very “Black living room,” you know what I mean? How we receive information together is so important for me, especially as an educator.

AC: Do you consider The Press to be a kind of extension of your art practice?

KW: Yes, but I also consider an artist to be essentially anyone who does some sort of material transformation with intention. So, I think a lot of people are artists in that way. Art feels like a rhetoric, or a rhetorical structure for transforming ideas and materials.

KW: The Press definitely started as an extension of my art practice, but I think it also started almost as a way of extending the language around my cultural position as an art producer and as a person of color in a long line of other artists, artists of color, Black artists, a support for a practice that had very little means of fabrication and production. There's Art and there’s art, and art with a big A is the most racist, sexist, unregulated industry in the world. And then art with a little a is any form of healing practice, transformation practice, material practice, like living with and around materials, that is bound to communicative technologies – a big part of what the artist does for society.

CASSANDRA started off as a way to make the little-a art in my work revealable or legible to the big-A art audience. Thinking through, especially the historical obscuring of Black femme positions and also Black cultural producers at large, CASSANDRA started off just trying to bring conversations to the level that I wanted to participate in, especially around my work. It started off as an invitation to participate in the work that came from the studio. As it’s evolved and [is] changing, it's completely separate from but supported by my practice in ways I’m still understanding.

That's also the myth of Cassandra. Cassandra's a prophetess, but she's doomed to never be believed. So, it's that kind of thing of being a native informant on ideas or concepts of freedom, being a native informant on concepts of even entanglement, imprisonment, incarceration, slavery, but never being believed, supported structurally but as a novelty of inclusion – navigating the bind of fetishism and degradation in all its presumptions, proximity and articulation; rage, anxiety, and embittered contextualization. It's been twelve years of that counter-learning that went into these first twenty-six readers. It feels therapeutic, and it's also a way for obsession to serve me or something.

AC: Memory seems to be a foundational principle. How does memory inform the theme, research, and creation of the CASSANDRA readers?

KW: A historical memory, feels like it slips away from Black people generationally; has something to do with how Blackness is constantly being undone. We don't have historical coherence because of so much fetishism and erasure. We don't have cultural memory because whiteness is largely a stake on policy and property. Blackness and race conceptually construct still or stuck subjectivizations, producing the necessity to re-invent, internalize, and resist simultaneously. It's a striking dissonance and aporia.

All these ways that time keeps up with us are super frustrating when we don't get to have time, and we don't get to have cultural memory turn into a protective policy. Logics emerge from policies, and that's why time and memory are so important because we are governed by emotions. Even as we are denied political power to build the infrastructure to protect our lives, we create even more potent emotional registers, language, poetics. And that's kind of the hope with CASSANDRA too, that we lay a groundwork for a varied look at the logic of race. We lay a path, not for people to necessarily walk down, but at least for there to be the mark of other paths. And other pasts.

Black rhythm and blues and other sonic traditions constantly influence major politics. It's like we're literally right there at the front of all of it and then simultaneously erased or made into symbols instead of regarded as human. It's the erasure that is [the] big part that links memory. It's not just memory, but it's also retrieval, restoration, recuperation.

KW: What I'd really love to see is deeper conversations, more conversations, and people feeling like they can also shoulder their own history in language; really giving language to a lot of the nuances in our history, and the un-nuanced places in our history. The transformation that also happened for me in CASSANDRA and in producing the Press was that I feel a lot more comfortable in the logics that I operate in, and I feel more comfortable pulling my own experience into and creating forms out of those logical propositions that serve me, essentially.

KW: I want to give that to students, a way to see through all the muck and entanglements and also to see yourself through those things; to be able to dis-identify with structural racism, sexism, marginal oppression, and to be able to really enjoy the history of the world.

AC: How does collaboration facilitate creation of the Press and the courses? How do you determine the creatives and scholars that you will collaborate with?

KW: Collaboration is everything. I think I was twelve or something [when] I read the first Toni Morrison novel, The Bluest Eye. But I really felt like, especially with the mechanisms of writing literature that Morrison was using from structural narratives or free associations, it was like fairy tales and kind of mythic songs, and it collapsed everything, and then it really opened the whole world up to me. So, I remember being deeply changed by some of the first books that I read on my own from start to finish, and then the people who wrote them, or the characters in them, became working parts of my imagination. They were early collaborators. Working with others who hold the voices of history dear to their imaginations; it's almost more than collaboration for me. It's really like it anchors me in my own imagination, seeing what other people do, seeing the things that other people create, and being able to kind of blend minds, mechanisms, theater to performance to poetry to music to design. It's always really exciting to me seeing how other people think, and essentially just getting to enter into their narratives and create a third thing out of the voices, choices, characters, etc., that we hold together and as individuals.

People that we collaborate with frequently end up being people who are just on the same frequency or channel. That's a really particular channel, for me and for us as a Press. Then there's also the way that we end up kinda catching each other's drifts. Collaboration, for me, is a place that resists institutional curation. If I figure out how to collaborate with people, then I get access to the part of them or the parts of being in relation to them that are generative and that's been really nice.

AC: Who were some of the Black women educators and/or mentors in your life that inspired or motivated your vision for CASSANDRA?

KW: There's a lot of our thinkers, contemporary and historic, that I feel have mentored my thoughts and mentored my understanding of where we are historically. In the real world, I think that's a big reason why the classes are really important. I didn't have Black mentors in school. And I think the school I went to set it up so that if you were in a program with a Black mentor, it was extremely competitive. And those mentors were by and large burnt out or dealing with white supremacists in their workplace.

So I feel like it's making the Black intellectuals that I love and that I am privileged enough to have worked with or collaborated with, giving the students who care, that haven't had to test into an ultra-private competitive university or pay $60,000 for access to that person. That's a big part for me about the mentoring and forming mentor relationships with CASSANDRA.

I think Ebony L. Haynes’s format of sharing her knowledge and sharing her experiences in the art world have been important. It's been really positive to see a kind of mentoring that I didn't have available to me as a student or when I've needed it being offered to Black students. I look forward to our programs and others in even more influential positions to open up the ranks, essentially, to greater mentoring capacities for more Black students. I'm still looking for Black mentors in real life who have space and time, and desire. And I'm thirty-five, and I'm still looking for mentoring in the arts.

AC: Can you share some thoughts about the ways community plays a role in your artist-run Press? And as a follow-up, how do you foster and maintain relationships while pursuing this work?

KW: My cousins Tyeisha Bright-Jones and Monica Strong co-founded the Brighter, Stronger Foundation in Baltimore; I look up to them immensely. Eisha gave me really good advice. Essentially, she's like, "You can serve a community, but you also need friends, family, lovers who get it, who are supportive. On top of that, you also need a therapist, like some person or praxis for relating to your body and relating to your emotions and stuff that's private from your family and from your work." And on top of that, she was saying, "You also need a work mentorship program. You need a group of other women who are doing this work to share the experiences of it because it is so specific." Black women who own any companies, we're just such a small demographic that's really not visible outside of the worst caricatures, like Sapphire and Jezebel and all them. It's like this constant quest, I guess, in a culture that is very quick to call Black women aggressive, ungrateful, ignorant, hysterical. Finding people to work, live, and love with and around who don’t tear you down is a struggle since, especially dark-skinned Black women hold such a heightened, unsympathetic symbolic space in our culture.

There's this philosophical term Aporia, and it means holding so many different contradictions. I just feel like being a Black woman, especially being a Black woman owner of something, is aporia. It's holding so many constantly contradicting thoughts, intentions and ways of operating in the world that yeah, that system of support is so important. I don't know how I'm doing it, honestly. I feel like with CASSANDRA and with my practice, with my collaborating style or whatever, it's very intimate. So, it is just like, "Call me, text me." It's people I talk to in the middle of the night, people who have an extra key to my house. Those are the people I'm working with. That gets me in trouble sometimes but I’m learning how to put my own safety first and steer with both eyes open, trust where it’s earned.

KW: Then deepening those relationships with people I've come across or who I've worked with before, and then being able to facilitate another context that we work in together. Like Derrias Carter is somebody I met at a conference in Toronto that Denise Ryner and Yaniya Lee organized, which was amazing. Yaniya and Jessica Lynne will be teaching an upcoming CASSANDRA class for the winter semester that I’m very excited for. Rhea and Ebony are in my auto-dial for everything. In that way, it gives me so many different relationships and the kinds of relationships that I think I really craved in my younger life. I’m excited for next semester, Manuel’s second iteration of their course because I want to take it myself.

I have an issue with #community. I'm not performative about that coming together.

AC: What are your concerns and hopes for the sustainable future of print publications?

KW: Print, I don't have a fear that it'll die out completely, but I definitely am nervous for whatever permutation is gonna happen now. Digitizing the Press was a really big step for me. I prefer serving localities, but I do think the Black diaspora is the reason why I'm interested in the digital and digital publication. I think white existential crises around the digital age are gonna be essentially sorted by a lot of Black Praxis. So, I feel like there's a way we're making sure that things like copyrights are in place, trademarks are in place, intellectual property is properly secured, guarded, but then also that it's allowed to be disseminated.

KW: It's hard to see the future of print and publications with the deaths of so many large publishing houses. But it's really amazing to see so many new marginal Black presses pop up that are able to do digital stuff. I don't see the digital moving me out of physical space; I see it kind of opening up or helping me shape physical spaces in the future more and with more agency than before. It's like the white walls are falling down, so we have more freedom, in a way, to pick the spaces that we want to engage in.

I'm really looking forward to this digital space, this space of digital publication, dissemination as a Black artist, and looking forward to seeing younger Black artists take advantage of the means of production that are available on the digital. I do think we're gonna figure out as a community a lot more ways of talking and sharing and archiving and re-archiving our history through the digital. I think the thing that I'm more worried about is that the page and the written page might become even more mythic. I think digital or virtual is really great for exploration, but it tends to be this tool of entertainment and marketing that is nefarious and insidious – colorism, racism, sexism applies to all these platforms. So, I'm interested in how Black artists are working to intervene on that, but I'm worried that parts of our history that haven't been digitized will become historical myths before they can become commonplace political knowledge.

AC: What are the long-term visions that you have for the Press? What impact do you hope that the Press will have? And ultimately, what legacy do you want the Press to leave?

KW: That's really heavy. Goals? Surviving is really the goal right now, staying safe, learning to protect and center what I care for, nurturing this project and others. Seems basic but they are goals.

KW: Our short-term goals for the next three years: I would love to develop the school into a potentially physical space, a library and school that's not in the United States or Europe; in the Caribbean where my family is from. We’re starting a kid’s imprint with some of our dearest family and friends. Shout out to Jasmine Sakkarah Boyd, Jenevieve Reid, Krystena Davis, Shanay Hutt, and Kyeree Wright, our development team on that project.

Long term I’d like to initiate a redress to the logic of primitivism. I think I and many other Black artists struggle with issuing reparative or restorative logics around racial evisceration. I don't exactly know how that goal will ultimately be achieved or realized as it rests in tandem within many dominant oppressive systems of belief. I'd love to see more of our white collectors or readers start actually doing the engagement with the way that the white subject is constructed, where it mixes myth and harm; how primitivism gives intellectual legs to a genocidal myth-making that keeps obsolescing the indexical experiences of Black authors. And I think that's what CASSANDRA, in the long term, can keep adding to the conversation is this discussion of how myth [is] produced, and then how can we deconstruct myth so that these racial mythologies don't, or at least aren't completely encapsulating our lives and our movements.

I think back to conversations with Noah Davis, who founded the Underground Museum, and how he communicated wanting space to be unb(other)ed. To start an organization where we're simply not othered. That line of thought, another long-term goal, to start an organization where Blackness, Black history, Black bodies, Black subjects, Black paintings – hell, black the color, is not othered. I think I also don't want to get trapped in a system of expectations or something that isn't coming out of being really connected to what's happening in the world for Black people.

This interview took place in November 2020 and was edited for brevity.

Angela N. Carroll is an artist-archivist; a purveyor and an investigator of art history and culture. She is a contributing writer for Hyperallergic, Sugarcane Magazine, Black Art in America, Arts.Black, BmoreArt and others. She received her MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California at Santa Cruz and currently teaches within the Film and Moving Image program at Stevenson University in Baltimore Maryland.

EDITED BY
Shantel Aurora of Saint Heron
Solange Knowles of Saint Heron

PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY
Kai Jenrette of Saint Heron
featuring Serre Moi Fort (2019), a collage by Emmanuel Yoro.

WEB DESIGN BY
Sabla Stays of Saint Heron
Kai Jenrette of Saint Heron
Albert L Hicks IV of Ayem

WEB DEVELOPMENT BY
Studio Otto