This panel examines the matter of posthumousness across a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts by African American authors and makers. We argue that a consideration of the posthumously published or produced text reveals all textuality to be necessarily unbounded, a process open to revision and reworking. Recent approaches to textual editing, such as Jerome McGann’s “theory of versions” and John Bryant’s notion of the “fluid text,” have attended to texts as multiform and indeterminate objects, manifesting in varied material and commercial configurations, and affected by the motivated entanglements of readers and viewers. Our discussion establishes the particular affordances of such approaches in relation to the history of African American culture, the production and circulation of which has often been vexed, dislocated, and uneven.

Long before the temporal turn in literary and cultural studies of the last decade, black activists and scholars have been attuned to the importance of time in African American culture. James Snead’s theory of the endless repetitions of “black time,” which continually cuts back against Western myths of linear progress, is expanded in recent work by Gregory Laski (Untimely Democracy, 2017), Michelle Wright (Physics of Blackness, 2015), Daylanne English (Each Hour Redeem, 2013), and others. Meanwhile, scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers have offered compelling accounts of the absences, gaps, and silences that shape the African American cultural archive, and the speculative forms of literary and cultural history that this archive therefore demands.

The frame of posthumousness allows us to examine problems of temporality as they connect to the needs and ethics of African American literary and cultural history, especially as the posthumous text reflects an impulse toward rediscovery, recovery, preservation, and re-circulation. As Sarah Gleeson-White considers the implications of the posthumous reemergence—indeed, the revenance—of a previously published black canonical text, Melanie Masterton Sherazi and Alix Beeston focus respectively on the posthumous transformation of textual notes into filmic form and a heretofore unproduced screenplay, itself already a mode of afterwardness. Together, the papers privilege the generative excess inherent in unfinished creative projects and their collaborative conditions of creation and dissemination. In theorizing the interrelations among social identity, aesthetic form, authorship, and collaboration, alongside temporalities of displacement inaugurated and amplified by an artist’s demise, this panel will also confront the limits and possibilities of recovery as a critical paradigm within African American studies.

Gleeson-White’s “Radical Unoriginality” considers the strange fortunes of Charles Chesnutt’s critically acclaimed The House Behind the Cedars (1900) as it appears in a series of collaborations with pioneering African American filmmaker and novelist Oscar Micheaux. After producing two screen versions of The House Behind the Cedars (1927, 1932), Micheaux, fifteen years after Chesnutt’s death, published his last novel, The Masquerade: An Historical Novel (1947), which he described in audacious understatement as a “rounding out and completion” of Chesnutt’s novel. The Masquerade not only reproduces more or less verbatim Chesnutt’s novel; it also inserts into its passing narrative a series of historical documents appertaining to slavery, secession, Civil War, and emancipation. Composed as a jumble of citations from imaginative and historical sources, The Masquerade contains little original to Micheaux. While scholars have thus dismissed it as a quirky footnote to, or embarrassing blemish upon, African American literary history, the reappearance of The House Behind the Cedars as The Masquerade invites a consideration of notions of authorship, particularly in the context of plagiarism. Gleeson-White reconsiders posthumous plagiarism in the context of African American (cultural) history first in terms of intellectual property and the discourse of ownership, and second, as a mode of preservation of a black archive.

Sherazi’s “The Juxtapositional Aesthetics of James Baldwin’s ‘Remember this House’ and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro” considers Baldwin’s unfinished 1979 text, composed of some thirty pages of elegiac notes and meditations about the lives and legacies of his murdered friends, Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and its transformation into Peck’s 2016 documentary feature, I Am Not Your Negro. Peck’s film is comprised of voiceovers of Baldwin’s writings, which are presented alongside civil rights era and contemporary media footage, photographs, and film clips. In keeping with Baldwin’s attention to sociality in the unfinished manuscript, the film’s arresting comminglings of text, sound, and image—its “juxtapositional aesthetics”—emphasize relational affinities. Peck’s hard edits and striking visual and sonic juxtapositions bring together the civil rights movement past with the 21st-century present and the Black Lives Matter movement, in particular: not as a linear continuum but as a dynamic gathering site of temporal density.

For Sherazi, posthumously released African American cultural productions about the black freedom struggle expose the ongoing, unfinished work of the era’s liberation movements, even as they solicit collaborative authorship, readership, and viewership to sustain and even metamorphosize such endeavors in the mode of a radical hospitality.

Likewise, in “Kathleen Collins, Posthumously,” Beeston explores how the posthumous text poses ethical and political challenges for its readers and audiences. Collins was little known before her death at the age of 46, in 1988, but her stories, plays, and films have been recovered over the last few years. Most recently, in January 2019, a selection from her archive appeared as Notes From A Black Woman’s Diary. Beeston focuses on “A Summer Diary,” a screenplay included in this new volume, in arguing that the pathos of Collins’s untimely death modulates all of her work. 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 pressurized 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 posthumous recovery work by readers and scholars. Whereas Collins seeks actively to demythologize the experiences of black women, we are bound precisely to mythologize Collins in her absence.

This session will comprise three 20-minute presentations. The presider, Shawn Salvant, will ensure there is adequate time (15 minutes) for, and oversee, questions and open discussion.