Tradition and the Black Atlantic

by Henry Louis Gates

  To talk about the way Looking for Langston sets in play history, identity, and desire, start with the fact that Looking for Langston is avowedly a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance. And let me emphasize that historical particularity is an essential part of the film’s texture, rather splendidly realized, I think, by Derek Brown, the film’s art director. Throughout the film, archival footage, including film extracts from Oscar Micheaux and period footage of Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues,” is interspersed with Nina Kellgren’s cinematography. What I want to argue is that the film’s evocation of the historical Harlem Renaissance is, among other things, a self-reflexive gesture; there’s a relation, even a typology, established between black British cinema of the 1980s and the cultural movement of the 1920s that we call the Harlem Renaissance. By the choice of subject, the film brings out, in a very self-conscious way, the analogy between this contemporary ambit of black creativity and a historical present.

  We look for Langston, but we discover Isaac. It’s an association that’s represented quite literally in one of the opening images of the film, where the film’s director makes his sole appearance in front of the camera. He is the corpse in the casket. With six mourners presiding, Hughes’s wake is a black-tie affair. And, of course, the film is also an act of mourning, in memoriam to three men who died in 1987: Bruce Nugent, James Baldwin, and Joseph Beam. (“This nut might kill us,” we hear Essex Hemphill say in one sequence, reflecting on the AIDS epidemic. “This kiss could turn to stone.”)

  Visually, as I mentioned, there’s a circulation of images between the filmic present and the archival past. Textually, something of the same interplay is enacted, with poetry and prose from Bruce Nugent (“Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” which receives perhaps the most elaborate and affecting tableau vivant in the film), Langston Hughes (including selections from “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Big Sea, Montage of a Dream Deferred, and other works), James Baldwin (from The Price of the Ticket), an essay by critic and journalist Hilton Als, and six poems by Essex Hemphill. We hear an interchange of different voices, different inflections, different accents, including Hall reading expository prose of Als, Hughes reading his own work, Toni Morrison reading Baldwin, and Erick Ray Evans reading Nugent. The credits include Hall’s as the “British voice,” an interestingly ambiguous formulation. The result is an interlacement of past and present, the blues, jazz, Motown, and contemporary dance music, London and New York: a trans-temporal dialogue on the nature of identity and desire and history.

  But the typology to which the film is devoted also enables another critique of the identity politics we’ve inherited from the black nationalism of our youth, a critique that focuses on a malign sexual politics. Like the self-proclaimed “aesthetic movement” of England’s yellow 1890s, chronicled by Arthur Symonds, parodied by Robert Hitchens, and promulgated by such “born antinomians” as Oscar Wilde, Alfred Douglas, and Lionel Johnson, the Harlem Renaissance was in fact a handful of people. The usual roll call would invoke figures such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and Bruce Nugent—which is to say that it was surely as gay as it was black, not that it was exclusively either of these things.

  Yet this, in view of its emblematic importance to later movements of black creativity in this country, is what makes the powerful current of homophobia in black letters a matter of particular interest and concern. If Looking for Langston is a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance, it is equally an impassioned rebuttal to the virulent homophobia associated with the Black Power and Black Aesthetic movements in the sixties. On this topic, the perfervid tone that Eldridge Cleaver adopted toward Baldwin—to whom Looking for Langston is dedicated—indicates only a sense of what was perceived to be at stake in policing black male sexuality. We see the same obsession running through the early works of Sonia Sanchez, and, of course, Amiri Baraka. “Most American White men are trained to be fags,” he wrote in the essay collection Home. “For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank, left without the hurt that reality makes.”25 Amid the racial battlefield, a line was drawn, but it was drawn on the shifting sands of sexuality. To cross that line, Baraka told us, would be an act of betrayal. And it is worth noting that, at least in a literal sense, the film opens in the year 1967, with the death of Langston Hughes and the playing of a Riverside radio program in memoriam.

  It is difficult to read Baraka’s words today: “without the hurt that reality makes.” Baldwin once remarked that being attacked by white people only made him flare hotly into eloquence; being attacked by black people, he confessed, made him want to break down and cry. Baldwin hardly emerged from the efflorescence of his black nationalism in the 1960s unscathed. Baldwin and Beam could both have told LeRoi Jones a great deal about the “hurt that reality makes,” as could a lot of black gay men in Harlem today who are tired of being used for batting practice. And in the wake of a rising epidemic of physical violence against gays, violence of the sort that Melvin Dixon has affectingly depicted in his novel Vanishing Rooms—it’s difficult to say that we have progressed since LeRoi Jones.

  That’s not to say that the ideologues of black nationalism in this country have any unique claim on homophobia. But it is an almost obsessive motif that runs through the major authors of the Black Aesthetic and the Black Power movements. In short, national identity became sexualized in the 1960s in such a way as to engender a curious subterraneous connection between homophobia and nationalism. It’s important to confront this head on to make sense of the ways Looking for Langston both fosters and transcends a kind of identity politics.

  Surely one of the salient features of the work is its attitude toward the corporeal, the way in which the black body is sexualized. Gloria Watkins has noted that Nina Kellgren’s camera presents the black male body as vulnerable, soft, even passive, in marked contrast to its usual representation in American film. This is a way of disrupting a visual order, a hardened convention of representation. There’s a scene in which we see slides of Robert Mapplethorpe photos projected on a backdrop while a white man walks through them. And I think there’s a tacit contrast between those images, with their marmoreal surfaces and primitivist evocations, and Kellgren’s own vision of masculinity unmasked. Indeed, this may be the film’s most powerful assault on the well-policed arena of black masculinity. “And soft,” Nugent writes of his character Beauty, “soft” (my italics).26

  In short, by insistently foregrounding—and then refiguring—issues of gender and desire, filmmakers such as Reece Auguiste, Maureen Blackwood, and Isaac Julien are engaged in an act of both cultural retrieval and reconstruction. And the historicity of that act—the way it takes form as a search for a usable past—is, as Hazel Carby and Houston Baker show, entirely characteristic of diasporic culture.

  So the dialogue with the past, even a past figured as nonrecuperable, turns out to be a salient feature of what might be called the Black London Renaissance. The partnership of past and present is recast across the distances of exile, through territories of the imagination and of space.

  A film like Looking for Langston is able to respond to the hurtfully exclusionary obsessions of the black nationalist moment, and our own cultural moment as well, by constructing a counter-history in which desire and mourning and identity can interact in their full complexity, but in a way that registers the violence of history. So there are two reductive ways of viewing the film. The first is preoccupied with fixing the historical questions about Hughes’s sex life. The second says that the film is an imaginative meditation and that “real” history is completely immaterial to it. On their own, both approaches are misguided. A more instructive approach is emblematized nicely by the Akan figure of sankofa itself (the word literally means “go back and retrieve it”), which refers to the figure of a bird with its head turned backward: again, the partnership of past and present. Obviously, the film isn’t positivist history, and yet history, and the status of history, are its immediate conc
erns. So we need to take seriously what Kobena Mercer calls the “artistic commitment to archaeological inquiry” that’s at work and at play here.27 And, of course, Hall’s insistence that “cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories,” is very much to the point.

  Hall’s involvement is, of course, audible in this film, and I mean that literally: We hear his voice on the soundtrack; we hear him reading poetry, thereby becoming a more than theoretical presence in the film. (And this literal insertion of the theorist into the practice isn’t uncommon in these films: In a Black Audio Film Collective production Twilight City (1989), directed by Reece Auguiste, Homi Bhabha remembers that the one thing that struck him when he first went to London as a boy was the absence of smell; he thought his nose had died.) In Julien’s film, we hear an enmeshment of the poetry of Langston Hughes with that of Essex Hemphill, among others, establishing that trans-temporal dialogue to which I referred previously, a discursive intercourse, on the nature of identity and desire and history.

  Although the film is not a simple exercise in identity politics, it cannot dispense with the moment of narcissism, of self-recognition. Hence the use of the mirror tableaux that thematize the film critic’s concern with the dialectic of identification and spectatorship. A man in a club sees himself in the mirror and is caught up short. Water—ponds and puddles—is used as a reflecting surface. Indeed, toward the film’s end we are presented with a series of men who lie, Narcissus-like, with their faces to a reflective surface. A belated version of the Lacanian mirror stage? Self-recognition? Or something else entirely? In the prose poem “The Disciple,” Oscar Wilde writes:When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

  . . . “We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.”

  “But was Narcissus beautiful?” said the pool. . . . “I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.”

  The film, remember, is called Looking for Langston ; it does not promise he will be found. In fact, I think that Looking for Langston leads us away from the ensolacement of identity politics, the simple exaltation of identity. We are to go behind the mirror, as Wilde urged. The film gives us angels—there are six of them, including musician Jimmy Somerville, with wings of netting and wire—but they are fallen angels, as Hemphill tells us. There are moments of carnival—a club with spirited dancing amid the smashing of champagne glasses—but there are no utopias here. An angel holds a photograph of Langston Hughes, of James Baldwin, but history remains in the phrase that Hall repeats: “the smiler with the knife.” The carnival is disrupted by a group of men who are described indifferently by the credits as “thugs and police” and who present both the authority of the state and the skinhead malevolence that is its funhouse reflection. In films like Looking for Langston , Cultural Studies becomes cultural work.

  The Politics of Representation

  At the same time, the controversy that surrounds the production of Sankofa and Black Audio, the two most prominent collectives, leads to what has become the central problem for cultural criticism in our day. It’s a theoretical terrain that can be taken as either a gold mine or a minefield, depending on your point of view. I speak of the “new politics of representation” and the way this impinges on the normative self-image of the so-called oppositional intellectual.

  To the extent that black British cinema is represented as an act of cultural politics, it then becomes vulnerable to a political reproach as elitist, Europeanized, overly highbrow. As a black cultural product without a significant black audience, its very blackness becomes suspect.

  This line of reproach ought to ring a bell: As I suggested at the start, it reprises one of the oldest debates in the history of African American letters, which is usually framed as the Responsibilities of the Negro Artist. But the populist critique always operates in tandem as a statement about artists and critics.

  The centrality of the issue is shown in the fact that a synoptic manifesto on the new politics of representation was issued jointly by Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer.28 Their argument follows Paul Gilroy, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ernesto Laclau—and a certain eighteenth-century political theorist named Edmund Burke—in linking a critique of essentialism to a critique of the paradigm of representation as delegation.

  It’s been argued that we should supplant the vangardist paradigm of “representation” with the “articulation of interests.” In such a way can we lighten the “ burden of representation,” even if we cannot dispense with it. But whose interest is being articulated?

  Worrying that independent black British cinema has become too estranged from the black community, Gilroy has recently proposed what he calls “populist modernism”—which some have decried as a highbrow version of the NAACP Image Awards. There are worries that normative proposals such as populist modernism can become techniques for policing artistic boundaries, for separating the collaborationist sheep from the oppositional goats, or perhaps the other way around. Gilroy cites Richard Wright’s The Outsider as a model for black art, but the poetic career of Langston Hughes might be an even more appropriate candidate for the category.

  Perhaps more than any other African American artist in the last century, Hughes was elected popularly to serve as our “Representative Negro,” the poet of his race, just as Frederick Douglass had been known as the “Representative Colored Man in the United States” in the century before. As we know, the burden of representation bore heavily upon him, profoundly shaping his career and preoccupations, propelling and restraining his own involvement with literary modernism. Nor is it surprising that this image should be, even in our own day, subject to censorship and restriction. Julien’s difficulties with acquiring the rights to Hughes’s texts reflect, in an ironic way, the central argument of his film.

  How “modernist” is Julien’s own technique? Manthia Diawara, a leading intellectual champion of black British cinema, has observed that Looking for Langston has evident affinities with many avant-garde and experimental films of the 1970s. And yet, he argues, the film “appropriates the forms of avant-garde cinema not for mere inclusion in the genre, but in order to redefine it by changing its content, and re-ordering its formal disposition.”29 In Julien’s hands, Diawara suggests, the techniques of the avant-garde are made to “reveal that which the genre itself represses.”30 Nor is it an uncritical act of reclamation. Diawara notes that “the dependency of artists and writers of the Renaissance upon their white patrons, and the links between the movement and the Modernist Primitivism, are revealed in Looking for Langston as moments of ambiguity and ambivalence.”31

  Indeed, the importance of open textured films like Looking for Langston is in presenting an aesthetics that can embrace ambiguity. Perhaps Looking for Langston is not without its reverential moments, but neither is it a work of naïve celebration. It presents an identitarian history as a locus of discontinuities and affinities, of shared pleasures and perils. Perhaps the real achievement of this film is not simply that it rewrites the history of African-American modernism, but also that it compels its audiences to participate in the rewriting.

  The strictures of “representation” have had wide and varied permutations in the black community. For as we know, the history of African Americans is marked by noble demands for political tolerance from the larger society, but also by a paradoxical tendency to censure our own. W. E. B. Du Bois was rebuked by the NAACP for his nationalism in the 1930s and then again for his socialism a decade or so later. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were victims of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, the former for his sexuality, the latter for his insistence upon individualism. Martin Luther King and Eartha Kitt, strange bedfellows at best, were roundly condemned for their early protests against the Vietnam War. Amiri Baraka repudiated a whole slew of
writers in the 1960s for being too “assimilationist,” then invented a whole new canon of black targets when he became a Marxist a few years later. Michele Wallace, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker have been called black male-bashers and accused of calculated complicity with white racists. Not surprisingly, many black intellectuals are acutely aware of the hazards of falling out of favor with the thought police, whether in whiteface or black.

  So the very newest generation of black British cultural critics are brave, resourceful, and dialectical when they seek to recuperate everything that was right about the 1960s movements of ethnicist self-affirmation. I can’t pass over without comment the irony that even as the veterans and children and grandchildren of the American Black Arts Movement turn to black Britain to retheorize, at last, the vexed concept of ethnicity, the children of the black Britain diaspora are returning to the 1960s to recuperate usable models for the present. And that’s the historical significance of the fact that Mercer once gave a paper called “1968: Periodizing Postmodern Politics and Identity.” It marks the incorporation of the 1960s into that identitarian trajectory: an acknowledgment of another viable resource for cultural retrieval. Bury the body, and your kids will dig it up. (However slapdash, Ivory Keenan Wayan’s I’m Gonna Get You Sucka can at least be appreciated as an instantiation of Karl Marx’s famous line about the reprise of historical events: the first time as tragedy; the second, as farce.) And so the 1960s are retrieved under the auspices of the post- modern post-essentialist exaltation of contingency and indeterminacy without, however, the apocalyptic sounds that marked the decade’s inception. The 1960s tragedians will survive, if they survive, as players in a farce—a farce of racial perversions and sexual obsessions and (apologies to Coco Fusco) wet dreams of oppositionality.32 And as academicians, we have, all of us, been cast in an especially unrewarding role in that farce: The academic, naturally, must play the straight man, the straight man to history.