{"id":50575,"date":"2016-12-12T17:11:52","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T17:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50575"},"modified":"2016-12-12T21:12:29","modified_gmt":"2016-12-12T21:12:29","slug":"kathleen-collinss-whatever-happened-to-interracial-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50575","title":{"rendered":"Kathleen Collins\u2019s \u2018Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kathleen Collins\u2019s \u2018Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Books of The Times<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2016-11-29<\/p>\n

Dwight Garner<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Kathleen Collins<\/a>, Elizabeth Alexander<\/a> (fore.), Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?<\/em><\/a> (New York: Ecco, 2016)<\/strong><\/p>\n

When the filmmaker, playwright and fiction writer Kathleen Collins<\/a> died of breast cancer in 1988, at 46, she left behind a wide body of work that\u2019s only beginning to see the light of day.<\/p>\n

She was among the first black women to direct a feature-length film. That movie, \u201cLosing Ground<\/a>\u201d (1982), parsed black intellectual life in New York City<\/a>; it was about a female philosophy professor and her wayward husband, a painter. It never had a theatrical release. Just last year its premiere was held at Lincoln Center<\/a>, where it played to sold-out crowds.<\/p>\n

She was a feverish artist, working on many fronts. In an essay in the September issue of Vogue<\/em><\/a>, her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins<\/a>, recalls, \u201cWhen I think back, the dominant sounds of my childhood are of my mother\u2019s IBM Selectric II<\/a> clattering away behind her bedroom door; film swishing through the Steenbeck<\/a> editing machine that sat in our dining room; and, occasionally, Tina Turner<\/a> blaring from the stereo while she danced like a madwoman in the living room.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…This collection\u2019s<\/a> title story gives us Ms. Collins in full flower. It is about two roommates in an Upper West Side<\/a> apartment. It\u2019s 1963 or, as Ms. Collins declares, \u201cthe year of racial, religious, and ethnic mildew.\u201d<\/p>\n

One roommate is a white community organizer in Harlem<\/a>, fresh out of Sarah Lawrence<\/a> and dating a black poet. The other is a young black woman who was jailed during civil rights protests in Georgia<\/a>; she\u2019s in love with a white Freedom Rider<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When the young black woman went South, she shed some of her proper bourgeois upbringing and began to feel the shaggy earth beneath her feet. Her father is apoplectic<\/a>. What\u2019s happened to his perfect strait-laced daughter?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kathleen Collins\u2019s \u2018Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?\u2019 Books of The Times The New York Times 2016-11-29 Dwight Garner Kathleen Collins, Elizabeth Alexander (fore.), Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (New York: Ecco, 2016) When the filmmaker, playwright and fiction writer Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, at 46, she left behind a wide body […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,20],"tags":[25700,7200,11551,25650,2640,25712,25699,2327],"class_list":["post-50575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-books-of-the-times","tag-dwight-garner","tag-elizabeth-alexander","tag-kathleen-collins","tag-new-york-times","tag-nina-collins","tag-nina-lorez-collins","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50575"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50599,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50575\/revisions\/50599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}