Callin’ out around the world: Isaac Julien's new ethnicities

Abstract

This essay addresses the role of African American culture in the work of filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien. Focusing on the films Looking for Langston: A Meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance (1989) and Baadasssss Cinema: A Bold Look at 70s Blaxploitation Films (2002) and the installation Baltimore (2003), I look at the ways that Julien's excavation of African American texts and traditions underwrites his eclectic auto/biographical – auto-ethnographic, auto-genealogical – project. First, I discuss the representation of Langston Hughes and the recovery of the interracial queer eroticism of the Harlem Renaissance in Looking for Langston. Next, I examine the treatment in Baadassss Cinema and Baltimore of 1970s blaxploitation cinema as a genre that resists the sanctioned versions of African American history and culture canonized in the Civil Rights movement, on the one hand, and Baltimore's Great Blacks in Wax Museum, on the other. Throughout, I suggest, Julien finds in the lives and work of African American writers and artists a prefiguration of his own enterprise. Yet, rejecting confinement in restrictive notions of race, nationality, and sexuality, Julien represents not only African Americans such as Hughes, but also Robert Mapplethorpe, Quentin Tarantino, and the Italian Renaissance painter Fra Carnevale, among others, as symbolic parents and surrogate selves. Refashioning the work of his precursors, I argue, Julien elucidates – and queers – what Stuart Hall identifies as “new ethnicities” and fashions himself as a cosmopolitan, diasporic, postimperial British subject.

Keywords:

• Isaac Julien
• African American culture
• autobiography
• Baadasssss
• Baltimore
• blaxploitation cinema
• Looking for Langston
• Harlem Renaissance
• self-fashioning

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the research assistance of Lorena Morales. Thanks, too, to the author's colleagues in the School of Humanities at Purchase College, Morris Kaplan, Paul Kaplan, Michael Lobel, and Michelle Stewart. This essay was energized by the stimulating discussions at Atlantic Crossings, a conference held in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on 1 March 2008, and at the conference of EACLALS in Venice 25–29 March 2008. The author thanks Pete Volich for facilitating her research in Isaac Julien's archive and Catherine Gibson for efficiently identifying apparently fugitive sources. Finally, the author thanks Isaac Julien for graciously inviting her to work in his archive and giving her permission to quote from notes and other material lodged there.

Notes

1. Martha and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Streets.”

2. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 166.

3. Julien curated an exhibition of Derek Jarman's work at the Serpentine Gallery 23 February – 13 April 2008. In his writing and interviews he cites as influences Stuart Hall, Jean Cocteau, Jarman, Laura Mulvey, and feminist conceptual artist Mary Kelly, among others. See, for example, Julien, “In Limbo”; “In Two Worlds.”

4. See Hall, “New Ethnicities” and “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”; Julien and Mercer, “De Margin.”

5. Julien, Notes.

6. Julien and Mercer, “True Confessions,” 208.

7. Gilroy, “Climbing the Racial Mountain,” 167; Julien, Notes.

8. Fusco, “Berlin Diary”; Tate, “On Looking for Langston,” 19; Gilroy, “Climbing,” 171; Julien, Notes.

9. Julien, Notes.

10. Gates, “Black Man's Burden,” 233.

11. English, How to See, 189, 195, 197.

12. Julien, Commentary; hooks, “Seductive Sexualities.”

13. See, for example, Fusco, “Berlin Diary”; hooks, “Seductive Sexualities”; Julien and Mercer, “True Confessions”; Silverman, Threshold, 104.

14. Julien, “Confessions of a Snow Queen,” 125.

15. Julien, “Confessions of a Snow Queen,”, 125.

16. See, for example, Aab-Richards, Tongues Untied, a collection of writings by and about gay black men in the US and the UK.

17. Fusco, “Sankofa,” 22.

18. See, for example, Hall, “New Ethnicities”; Gilroy, There Ain't No Black and Small Acts; Smith, New Right Discourse; Julien, “In Limbo,” 357–8.

19. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 47, 64–9; Smith, “Performativity,” 110.

20. Kureishi, “London and Karachi,” 273; a cinematic version of this narrative appears in Sammy and Rosie.

21. Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 13, 15.

22. Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,”, 20–1.

23. Phillips, The European Tribe, 1, 8.

24. On Phillips's auto/biographical project and engagement with African American culture, see Yelin, “Living Stateside” and “Plural Selves.”

25. See Hemphill, “Looking for Langston.”

26. Julien, “Interview with Bruce Morrow,” 407.

27. Nero, “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic,” 290; Nero's argument parallels that of Barbara Smith, who announced, in 1977, the need for “consciously Black woman-identified art.” See “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 5.

28. GLBTQ, “Hollinghurst, Alan”; Julien, “Confessions,” 125.

29. Phillips, “Kingdom of the Blind.”

30. Gates, “Black Man's Burden,” 232–3.

31. Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, 201, 206, 261.

32. Silverman, Threshold, 110.

33. Julien, Commentary; Notes.

34. Julien, Notes; Tate, “On Looking for Langston,” 19.

35. Julien, Commentary. Heaven is a gay nightclub in London which opened in December 1979.

36. Silverman, Threshold, 104.

37. Gilroy, “Climbing,” 169–70.

38. Mercer, “Traveling Theory,” 7, 8.

39. Julien, Commentary.

40. Both Julien and his collaborator Kobena Mercer changed their views of Mapplethorpe. In their jointly authored “True Confessions,” they characterize Mapplethorpe's work as a “reiteration” of “colonial fantasy,” yet they also assert that their “starting point is ambivalence” (208). Mercer revises this assessment in “Just Looking,” in part in response to Mapplethorpe's death of AIDS.

41. Guerrero, “The Black Man”; Julien, Baadasssss Cinema.

42. Guerrero, Framing, esp. 69–70.

43. Julien, Notes.

44. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 71. In a discussion of identity and difference Julien seems to be advocating an idea of “non-translatability” but actually sets forth a “creolizing vision,” and an idea of “contamination” that resemble rather than contradict the Benjaminian paradigm of translation. Julien, “In Limbo,” 371.

45. Julien and Ammirati, “My Pop.”

46. Julien, “Isaac Julien on Baadasssss!”

47. Julien, “Isaac Julien on Baadasssss!”

48. Kaltenbach, “You Could Call Him a Renaissance Man,” E26.

49. Julien, e-mail to author May 14, 2008; Julien, “In Limbo,” 371; On Baltimore, see the excellent discussion in English's How to See, 170–99.

50. Kaltenbach, “You Could Call Him.”

51. English, How to See, 184.

52. English, How to See, 192.

53. Hickling, “Isaac Julien.”

54. English, How to See, 175.

55. Julien, e-mail to author May 14, 2008.

56. Steiner, “Paradise Found.”

57. English, How to See, 186–7.

58. Julien, “In Limbo,” 366.

59. The Walters Art Museum, “Works of Art Overview.”

60. On the “African presence,” see Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”