Originally aired on the highly successful British series Out on Tuesday, a weekly lesbian and gay news show appearing on commercial television, Looking for Langston weaves the poetry of Langston Hughes and contemporary black gay poet Essex Hemphill with pieces of Bruce Nugent’s Harlem Renaissance short story ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’ to effect what director Issac Julien has described as a ‘relational shift between the past and the present’.

 The film’s discontinuous non-linear visual style is a montage of archival footage of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes reciting poetry to a jazz accompaniment, and contemporary imagery including a focus on the photography of Mapplethrope. The non-linear narrative is particularly striking and demonstrates the relational shift between the past and the present. This artistic choice authorizes a rethinking of the question of the relationship between the present and historical representation.

 Looking for Langston challenges its viewers to investigate racial histories that are intricately and antagonistically intertwined with histories of (homo)sexuality. These challenges demand accounts differential places within the historical development of racism, racial stratification and racialized cultural.