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.