In 1989, Isaac Julien released Looking for Langston, using the figure of American poet Langston Hughes to explore historical attitudes toward black male homosexuality. Julien’s film asserted the specificity of a black gay male figure located firmly within diasporic modernity. No longer the “face of the Harlem Renaissance,” Hughes is revised and updated according to a sensibility for which the repression of interracial, queer, and other homosocial themes is no longer feasible. Keith will re-examine the cultural studies paradigm of 1980s London, providing an in-depth reading of Looking for Langston that unearths Julien’s dialogue with artist Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography.
