Thelma Golden brings together artists who challenge the fetishized and over-determined image of black masculinity.
Kobena Mercer highlights photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s interest in the ecstatic possibilities of shattering identity.
Looking for Langston defies narrative and temporal conventions in a queer historiographic intervention.
History is “the smiler with the knife” in Looking for Langston. Violence is foregrounded as a powerful force in the construction of historical narratives as well in the very act of looking. If we agree with Thelma Golden’s assertion that representation is central to power and that “the real struggle is over the power to control images,” then Looking for Langston can be seen as an intervention speaking truth to power. The formal experimentation with narrative structure, the nonlinear montage of poetry with archival images, for example, and the use of multiple voices supports the radical intervention undertaken by the film. Isaac Julien undertakes an intersectional exploration of race, gender performance and sexuality that, in terms of both content and form, is multifaceted and fluid. As Golden and Mercer point out in their analyses of the images circulating of black masculinity and sexuality, these images overwhelmingly confine black male identity to the fixed, singular vision of white patriarchy. The film self-reflexively displays the processes by which images of black gay men are consumed while attempting to reclaim a space for black voices to queer the dominant narrative about the Harlem Renaissance. In a sequence about midway through the film the possessive white gentleman from the club sequences walks past a series of projected images of black male nudes, touching the screen as he passes. Thus this film, like the photographers who reacted to Mapplethorpe’s Black Males series, for example, explores the troubled dynamics of voyeuristic pleasure and fetishism that operate in the images circulating of black masculinities.