Abstract
Through a semiotic approach partly drawing on the work on multimodality by Kress and van Leeuwen and strongly influenced by the theoretical tradition of the Caribbean diaspora, this chapter proposes a new reading of Isaac Julien’s iconic film Looking for Langston (1989). Complemented by references to film theory and the studies on masculinity, it will explore Julien’s re-articulation of the socio-culturally constructed and historically contingent concept of “black masculinity”. By hybridising the visual (so prominent in Western epistemological tradition) with the senses of hearing and touch, Julien disrupts Western culturally produced regularities (or “grammar”) in order to propose alternative ways of seeing based on a fluid conception of identity and sexuality. As a result he traces a more ambiguous, almost vulnerable, “black masculinity”, thus deprived of its mask of apparent strength and aggressiveness.
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Notes
- 1.
Like other independent film collectives, the Sankofa was born thanks to funding allocated by the British government as a way of reducing the increasing number of uprisings by the UK ethnic minorities that protested against their underrepresentation and misrepresentation within public discourse and the media (Kettle and Hodges 1982; Scarman 1982; Mercer 1994: 76). The name Sankofa—the Adinkra symbol meaning literally “go back and retrieve it”—served as a motto for the founders (black filmmakers involved in feminist and gay liberation movements) who were interested in retrieving hidden past histories with which to interrogate the present. This is a concept that also lies at the base of Looking for Langston which was re-screened on 7 and 15 October 2017 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of the exhibition Black Intimacy.
- 2.
Until November 2017, London-based Julien was present at the inaugural Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale with Western Union: Small Boats. Previously, in 2015, he presented Kapital and directed Das Kapital Oratorio in the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale for the exhibition All the World’s Futures curated by Okwui Enwezor, and was artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome to work on a project on the life and work of the Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi.
- 3.
Glissant ’s “passion for memory” is also recalled by another film produced by Julien: The Passion of Remembrance (1986). The importance of memory and creative reconstruction, furthermore, associates Julien ’s poetics to Romare Bearden ’s use of the collage technique to usher the past into the present: “When I conjure these memories” said Bearden with reference to the collage fragments, “they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time” (Ulaby 2003).
- 4.
“Homosexuality was a sin against the race , so it had to be kept a secret, even if it was a widely shared one”, states Stuart Hall in the film (Hall in Julien 1989).
- 5.
Julien ’s investigation of black queer desire has been carried over subsequently in the film Young Soul Rebels (1991), and in the trilogy formed by the short film The Attendant (1993) and the installations Trussed (1996) and Three (1999).
- 6.
Note Julien’s use of the name “Beauty” (taken from Nugent’s short story) to re-inscribe the stereotypical image of the black man as “beastly”.
- 7.
This interpretation is reinforced by Hemphill’s words that read from his poem “If His Name Were Mandingo” while on the screen the exchange of money takes place: “He speaks good damn English to me/[…] I don’t suppose you ever hear him clearly?/You’re always busy,/seeking other things of him./His name isn’t important./It would be coincidence/if he had a name,/a face, a mind./If he’s not hard-on/then he’s hard up/and either way you watch him” (Hemphill 1992: 141).
- 8.
In Reading Images (2006) Kress and van Leeuwen develop a theory for reading images based on Halliday’s theory of language . According to Halliday (1973) all meaning-making systems perform three main functions: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The ideational function refers to the expression of ideas and the making of meanings about the individual’s inner and outer worlds; the interpersonal function has to do with the enactment of interpersonal relationships between the speakers; and the textual function, which mediates between the previous two, indicates the creation of coherence and cohesion in the text. To these linguistic functions Kress and van Leeuwen match respectively a representational, interactive, and compositional one, which they use for the interpretation of images as part of a grammar of visual representation.
- 9.
The untitled photograph by George Platt Lynes portrays three men (two are naked: one is lying on a bed and the other, standing, is undressing the third man). It is dated 1942 and can be found in Leddick (1997: 21).
- 10.
The room seems to be a more or less intentional intertextual reference to another famous room, the one that David and Giovanni share in the novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) by James Baldwin , whose ménage à trois (David-Giovanni-Hella) recalls, in turn, the one in Nugent’s short story (Alex-Beauty-Melva).
- 11.
The timeless aspect of the film is also emphasised by the black and white shooting that allows Julien to introduce very rare original moving scenes of black people in 1920s–1930s (i.e. Oscar Micheaux’s 1932 film Ten Minutes to Live) and by the choice of music, which shifts from the first voices to sing homosexual love in the African American blues tradition (i.e. Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues”, George Hannah’s “Freakish Man Blues”, and Kokomo Arnold’s “Sissy Man Blues”) to 1980s ones (from Blackberri’s “Blues for Langston” and “Beautiful Blackman” to the Chicago gay disco anthem “Can You Party” by Royal House), therefore connecting the blues poetics to queer desire.
- 12.
Water symbolism is also present, among the others, in Julien’s installations Paradise Omeros (2002) and Ten Thousand Waves (2010). In Paradise Omeros, inspired by Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), the image of the sea connecting opposite shores with its back and forth movement makes the spectator ponder over the “passage” between the self and the other, love and hate, good and evil, never fully antithetic but always coexisting. More recently in Ten Thousand Waves, Julien remembers the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which more than 20 Chinese cockle pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank off the coast in northwest England, by poetically weaving together stories linking China’s ancient past and present.
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Amideo, E. (2018). Undoing Black Masculinity: Isaac Julien’s Alternative Grammar of Visual Representation. In: Baker, P., Balirano, G. (eds) Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95327-1_10
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