Alix Beeston Abstract

This paper is part of a pre-constituted panel titled ‘The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film in the United States and Latin America’

“Kathleen Collins, Posthumously”

“One never talks out loud without wishing for an audience,” or so says a character in one of Kathleen Collins’s plays. Yet to be Collins’s audience today—to examine the textual materials that survived her death, at the age of 46, in 1988—is to occupy an uncomfortable position in relation to African American film history. During her lifetime, Collins was known primarily as a playwright, but she was also the author of numerous short stories, at least one unfinished novel, and several screenplays. One of these screenplays became the 1982 dramatic feature Losing Ground. But the film was scarcely shown at its release, and it only became widely known in 2015, when it was remastered and released on the festival circuit. The following year, sixteen of Collins’s stories were published in the volume Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?; and, in January 2019, another selection from her archive appeared as Notes From A Black Woman’s Diary.

 

This paper argues that the pathos of Collins’s untimely death modulates all of her recovered work, and that this produces particular ethical and political challenges for her posthumous audience. It focuses particularly on “A Summer Diary,” a screenplay written in 1974–1975 but never produced. The screenplay is the shadowy double of the “complete” film, a precursory and intermediary textual object that engenders a peculiar agency in its readers. This agency is pressurised in “A Summer Diary.” Not only do Collins’s thematic preoccupations synch uncannily with the screenplay’s (in)complete status, but her wider project of representation sits in tension with the imperatives of recovery work by readers and scholars. Whereas Collins seeks actively to demythologise the experiences of Black women, we are bound precisely to mythologise Collins in her absence.