THINKING OTHERWISE: THE POLITICS OF BLACK QUEER FILMMAKING

CHRISTOPHER G. SMITH

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•+• Canada Abstract

Thinking Otherwise: the Politics of Black Queer Filmmaking

This thesis examines black gay men's cultural production as a site of black queer theorizing. Through a critical re-reading of the filmmaking of Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs, and Edimburgo Cabrera I discuss their artistic contributions as a textual/theoretical resource for the emergent field of Black Queer Studies. Divided into three case-studies this thesis explores each artists' informative insights on the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality and national belonging. Critical attention is paid to the manner in which current black queer scholars mobilize these insights to demand a paradigm shift within the fields of Black Studies and Queer Studies.

IV For her continual love and support, I dedicate this work to my mother (a.k.a. "mummy").

V Acknowledgements

Many people have provided substantial support to ensure the successful completion of this study. First, I would like to thank Leslie Sanders, Warren

Crichlow, and Janine Marchessault. Each of these scholars have leant their expertise to enrich this project in ways I had not imagined. I am eternally grateful to the three of you for what you have brought to bear on my intellectual and scholarly development.

The success of any scholarly project is dependent on a strong administrative support system. Over the years Ouma Jaipaul-Gill has been a stellar administrator who has made this a journey full of genuine support and encouragement. Any student who passes through the Graduate Programme in

Interdisciplinary Studies comes to the end of the tunnel knowing that our success is in part due to your guidance through this process. Thank you.

Similarly, I am indebted to the overwhelming support of Prof. Marlene

Kadar. Through her leadership as Program Director, Prof. Kadar has provided a level of support for the graduate students under her guidance that is unmatched in my imagination. I am certain that I am neither the first nor the last person to share this sentiment.

Many friends and colleagues have provided support for this endeavour whom I am proud to acknowledge here. The following individuals stand out as stellar scholars and great friends; Rinaldo Walcott, Katherine McKittrick and John

vi Grundy. I have cherished out critical dialogues over friendly cocktails and look forward to future engagements of plotting and conspiring.

Lastly, I would like to thank the filmmakers that are examined in this study;

Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs (R.I.P.) and Edimburgo Cabrera. Their provocative insights on all matters black and queer have been inspirational. Your artistic contributions continually challenge us to think otherwise.

Vll Table Of Contents

Abstract iv

Introduction: Thinking Otherwise: Black Queer Filmmaking and The "beginnings" of Black Queer Studies 1

1. Isaac Julien: Autography, and the Articulation of Black Queer Thought 15

i) Autography: A Primer 16

ii) The Politics of Autography in/of Young Soul Rebels 19

iii) Young Soul Rebels and the cultural context of its inception 22

iv) Enter Julien's Motley Crew

2. Marlon Riggs and "our" Historical Routes 40

i) Autography, Marlon Riggs and The Politics of Black Queer Filmmaking 41

ii) From Ethnic Notions to Black is Black Ain't - Marlon Riggs' . Legacy 44

iii) Black Studies/Queer Studies -convergences and extrapolations..51

iv) Is "Quare Studies" still "quare" by another name? 53

v) Once You Go Black... a cautionary tale 57

Vlll 3. "Usable Routes": Edimburgo Cabrera and The Movements of Black Queer Studies 61

i) Unfinished Stories 63

ii) "Where" is the love?, ... is the question 69

Conclusion: Towards a Black Queer Studies in/thru Canada 78

Bibliography 83

Filmography 89

IX Introduction - Thinking Otherwise: Black Queer Filmmaking and The "beginnings" of Black Queer Studies.

To think, on the contrary, is to pass through; it is to question that order, to marvel that it exists, to wonder what made it possible, to seek, in passing over its landscape, traces of the movement that formed it, to discover in these histories supposedly laid to rest "how and to what extent it would be possible to think otherwise." - Michel de Certeau, The Laugh ofFoucault1

De Certeau's astute insights on the critical work of Michel Foucault have much to tell us about what is at stake in the practice of interdisciplinary scholarship. Indeed, much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is marked by such critical interventions that have sought to trace specific histories, narratives and knowledge that fall outside of the pale of conventional and legitimated academic disciplines. To posit that such an intervention is potentially a political one would be an understatement. Much of the recent pursuit towards interdisciplinary scholarship has been driven in part by the desire to excavate the histories of social subjects who have been marginalized from or misrepresented by the canons of established academic disciplines.2

Whether we refer to the inauguration of Black Studies, Women's Studies or Lesbian and Gay Studies (herein referred to as Queer Studies) in North

American contexts, interdisciplinary praxis is indelibly an act of an interventional politics. The Foucauldian position which de Certeau elucidates is not solely a

1 Michel de Certeau, "The Laugh of Foucault" Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 194. 2 To be clear interdisciplinary praxis has a longer history and disciplines such as Sociology have themselves emerged through such a process. When I refer to "recent pursuits" I am signalling primarily subject-based fields (i.e. Women's Studies, Black Studies etc..) that focus on a specified set of social subjects.

1 performance of impertinence toward the disciplinary constraints of the human sciences. It is a reminder that in our current times the humanities are challenged by the heterogeneous and fluid forms of cultural practice, sociality and politics that are constantly at play.

How, for instance might we account for the arts, politics and expressive cultures of black gays and lesbians when at the insistence of their performative practices one is indeed compelled to confront the contours of a variety of scholarly endeavours that oftentimes imagine themselves epistemologically as mutually exclusive?

In the 1980s a renaissance of cultural production by black queer authors, filmmakers, and visual artists occurred that contested prevailing notions of what constituted "race" and "race-relations". Reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, various artists in Canada, the United States, and the

U.K. sought to produce artwork that insisted on a more pluralistic vision of identity, in particular "black identity". By situating questions of racial and ethnic identity in critical dialogue with questions of gender and sexuality, such work challenged the prevailing notion of a homogenous and unified black identity that had structured black communal and political life. One of the primary contentions was that in a post-civil rights movement era, one cannot address "race-relations" in Western nation-states, without examining the confluence of systems of oppression that stratify societies based on race, gender, sexuality, and class. 2 This artistic movement can be characterized by (but certainly not limited to) the work of author/poets such as Essex Hemphill, and Courtnay McFarlane,

and filmmakers such as Isaac Julien and Marlon Riggs. In conjunction with the

resurgence of black queer cultural production, scholarly initiatives (often by the

artisthemselves) sought to critically engage this moment by mobilizing the

insights of black queer artists in the academic fields of literary studies, film

studies, African-American studies, and lesbian and gay studies, to name a few.

Upon an initial glance, the prevailing understanding among black queer

artists was that cultural production can be instructive in realms outside of the

arts. As such in tandem with the production of the artwork itself, the artists

grappled with the manner in which such work would be studied, by whom, and in what academic arena. Joseph Beam's In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology, and

Essex Hemphill's Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, stand out

as literary artefacts of this phenomenon.

The emergence of the academic field of Black Queer Studies, suggests

that this coalescence of art, politics and knowledge production is both

acknowledged and that this prior intervention is worthy of mobilization.

With this historical context in mind, Robert Reid-Pharr rightfully asks

some decades later; "what sort of moment is this in which to pose the question of

3 a queer black studies?"3 In an attempt to answer this quandary Dwight McBride has suggested that what is at issue is the "politics of narrative representation"4 that insist on the privileging of one category of social analysis in a manner that might overlook the possible intersection of differential forms of oppression that often shape social realities. McBride further suggests that the primacy of "race" in African-American academic and public discourse tends to obfuscate the complexities of racialized subjects, in particular black gays and lesbians. From the outset such a project calls into question both the subject(s) and objects of study that Black Studies (in particular, though not limited to) are labouring with and purportedly on behalf of.

Mapping the emergence of the field of Black Queer Studies, Rinaldo

Walcott extends the terrain of this conversation by positing that the "collision" of

Black Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Queer Studies can produce a "reading practice, which can disrupt the centrality of nationalist discourse within the Black

Studies project", in particular its American incarnation."5

Taking the above positions into account it can be suggested that one catalyst for the emergent field of Black Queer Studies is a need to propose more

3 Robert Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and The Black American Intellectual (New York: NYU Press, 2007) 167. 4 Dwight McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race And Sexuality (New York: NYU Press, 2005)131. 5 Rinaldo Walcott, "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora," Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 90-91 4 comprehensive and holistic methods for social analysis. At a minimum such a pursuit incorporates critiques of "race", gender, sexuality, class, and nationalism as categories that stratify individuals into unequal relations with each other.

What remains is the lingering question of why the medium of film enables such critiques to be raised with a profundity that academic discourse cannot immediately capture in isolation?

It is with this important question in mind that this examination of black queer cinematic work is rightfully situated. The contention throughout this study is that the aforementioned debates about the complexity of black subjectivities within academia that ultimately shaped the Black Queer Studies moment are better understood if a consideration of other interlocutors is articulated. Following de Certeau, this study is an attempt to cross over this landscape not to establish or define what "black queer studies" is but rather to highlight the interventions of black queer filmmakers that engendered its possibility.

A key concern in this study is the place of black Canada within this conversation. Following Walcott's provocation, in examining the artists chosen for this study an attempt is made to highlight the circuits of discourse that might un­ moor Black Queer Studies from its presumed U.S. origins. The intent of such a position is to bring to the fore the outer national political identifications that have informed the art and expressive cultures of Black LGBT persons who reside in

Canada because they are often, if not always, in conversation with like minds 5 across borders. At the heart of such an inquiry is the critical question of what happens to Black Queer Studies when its critical discourses pass in/through different national contexts?

Thus the "in/through" of such a position marks a distinct critical and performative practice that maps Canada in the conversation engendered by

Black Queer Studies. This is not a supplementary effort but rather a historical corrective that furthers the dialogue by engaging "the queer place[s] in the diaspora".6 While the content of this study is primarily engaged in a theoretical enterprise there are two overarching themes that influence the discussions that will follow in subsequent chapters;

i) If one of the primary imperatives of (film) art is to enable its unanticipated audiences to gain insight into a collective sense of humanity, what different forms of communal living are imagined and elaborated upon in the work of black filmmakers - and why do they matter? ii) What does the emergent field of

Black Queer Studies in the US academy offer to the production of knowledge about the confluence of 'race', sexuality, gender and nationalism in other national contexts?

There are many accomplished artists whose contributions have enabled similar conversations to occur, the specific artists discussed in this study have been chosen in part because of the continued interest in their oeuvres within

6 academia; Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien, and Edimburgo Cabrera. Each of these artists has contributed to the intellectual dialogue that characterizes the emergence of Black Queer Studies, but from different locales, and the politics of their national contexts.

In a similar vein each of these artists' work engage within and in-between various cinematic genres and forms, documentary, narrative-fiction, and avant- garde. This fluidity of form in many ways mirrors the playful interdisciplinarity of

Black Queer scholarship, and is worthy of remarking upon.

More important, these artists have been in conversation with each other through their cinematic texts, and the discourses about their art. This facet of their work has received little attention from film scholars regardless of whether their work formally resides in the field of Film Studies or in the discourses of contemporary criticism in Black Studies and Queer Studies.

One obvious thread that weaves together the film art of Riggs, Julien, and

Cabrera is indeed the politics of 'representation'. Each of these artists speak to the manner in which the 'black' body, subjectivity and identity has been historically represented in the genres they both work within and contest.

A critical re-reading of Julien, Riggs and Cabrera's artistic practices reveals a deeper philosophical tie that binds these artists.7 As the following case-

6 Ibid, p. 90 7 As an interpretive method of criticism, a critical re-reading rests on the premise that "[T]he possible meanings of a film, as with all signifying practices, reside in the interaction between the 7 studies will illuminate, each of these artists are heavily in dialogue with theoretical discourses (especially those in Continental Philosophy) that shape how they engage the field of representation. Viewing them in this manner they are, indeed, artist-intellectuals.

Rather than posit an historical narrative of the evolution of Black Queer

Studies, this thesis engages a series of key moments that served as catalysts for the formation of the field. Each of the chapters (or case-studies) engages a specific artist-intellectual and the discourses their work is influenced by and is influencing. Each discussion highlights the artist's contributions to critical discourses within Black Studies and Queer Studies in particular. Taken together these case-studies will highlight the critical issues that prompted the emergence of the field of Black Queer Studies.

Chapter 1 opens this study with a discussion of Isaac Julien's oeuvre in order to introduce the concept of "autography" posited by cultural studies scholar

Stuart Hall.8 The concept of autography will be discussed in greater detail, however it is best characterized as a practice of engaging with and rewriting the signs, codes and discourses that produce an intelligible racialized body.

Autography as it is mobilized by Julien departs from the philosophical work of

viewer and the text." For examples of such work see: Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film (London: Routledge, 1990) or Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in The Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). 8 Hall, Stuart. "The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?" The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation ed. Alan Read. 8 Frantz Fanon, in particular Black Skin, White Masks. With this concept, Julien utilizes Fanon's insights on the scopic drive to self-fashion images of the black queer body that had yet to surface in black cinematic representation. Applying

Hall's concept as a method, one is better able to discuss the dialogical relation between Riggs, Julien, and Cabrera and the "switch points" that bring together discourses of "blackness", and "queerness" in their film art. 9

While much has been written on Julien's groundbreaking cinematic meditation on the life and work of author Langston Hughes Looking for Langston

(1989) - in both the fields of African-American Studies and Queer Studies, the single popular work in his oeuvre Young Soul Rebels (1991) has received little attention. A critical re-reading of Young Soul Rebels in this chapter explores his interventions into dominant notions of "community" and nation that are both produced by and shape the black studies project.

Key to this examination is the intimate relationship between Julien's art and Black British Cultural Studies, characterized by Julien's continued engagement with scholars such as Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, and Paul Gilroy.

While this case-study could be read as representing a "black British" perspective, this study considers the role that Julien's work accomplished through the interaction of Black British Cultural Studies and black scholarship abroad. Thus

Seattle: Bay Press, 1996). 9 Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where 'Black' Meets 'Queer' (New York: NYU Press, 2006). 9 Julien's emergence on the North American art scene offers one key moment that provoked or enhanced black queer theorizing.

In Chapter 2 I provide an overview of Marlon Riggs' oeuvre, beginning with his 1986 film Ethnic Notions. The chapter begins with a discussion of the strategies utilized by Riggs to critique normative notions of gender and (black) sexuality as they have come to surface in the realms of both visual and cinematic culture. The impetus for this examination is to problematize the manner in which

Riggs' works have been taken up by particular black queer scholars. At issue is the tendency of such scholars to mobilize Riggs' later works (Tongues Untied,

Black Is, ... Black Aint) under the assumption these films represent the more explicitly "queer" works in his oeuvre. In distinction from this scholarship, Riggs work is considered in its entirety. As such it is argued that his early films provide the critical/theoretical foundation for the interrogation of the "official" discourses of "blackness" and "queemess" that would shape his later and final films. At the heart of Rigg's films Ethnic Notions, and Color Adjustments his desire to document the historical context of cinematic images of black bodies. I contend that this aspect of Rigg's interventions in his earlier films sets the stage for the self-fashioning of black gay imagery that are made available to audiences in his later films.

My interest here is the manner in which Black Queer Studies is often moored within a U.S. centered frame, although particular intellectual interactions 10 undermine this assumption. Underiding this examination is an important consideration of the dialogues between Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien. In particular, I revisit a debate between them regarding cinematic form and its political implications for black independent filmmaking and its black queer interlocutors. This engagement highlights another key moment of artistic and intellectual exchange that has shaped the questions of black queer scholars.

Throughout this chapter I examine the directions taken by black queer scholars as they mobilize Marlon Riggs' insights. In particular, the work of Dwight

McBride, and E. Patrick Johnson provide two differential trajectories for black queer studies. While both are formally situated in the field of African-American

Studies, what signals their notable difference is the academic audience they address in their interventions. In drawing on the insights of black gay men's cultural production McBride can be said to be transforming the black studies project from within. In his call for a "Quare Studies" Johnson carves out a third space that signals the gaps in both Black Studies and Queer Studies. I contend

Johnson's position is made possible by the interaction of artist-intellectuals such as Isaac Julien with his North American counterparts. This assertion will be explored in depth.

In chapter 3 I extend Rinaldo Walcott's call for a "black queer diaspora studies" through a consideration of the documentary filmmaking of Edimburgo

Cabrera. This case study examines Cabrera's Latin Queens (2001) and Divas: 11 Love Me Forever (2002). By pinpointing the influences of black queer filmmakers such as Marlon Riggs, this consideration of Cabrera's oeuvre illustrates the necessity for a diasporic conversation about the emergence of Black Queer

Studies. I conclude with a proposal for what will be termed the "usable routes" that might inform the direction of and an alternative foundation for a Black Queer

Studies project.

The intention in this gesture is not to inaugurate yet another 'field' per se, but rather to map out the critical positions and instantiations that have engendered the Black Queer Studies moment, but in an outer national frame.

The ultimate goal is to develop a grammar that can tease out the thorny complexities of racial, gendered, sexual and national affiliations as they are often experienced within the context of living in Canada.

The sensibility of de Certeau's remarks provided the point of departure for this study. It is about many things - film criticism, the study of black queer filmmaking and the places where such studies reside. But above all it is about the boundaries that inform and constrain such pursuits. In short - the question before us is what compels us to "think otherwise"?

My decision to frame this study as "crossing over this landscape" stemmed from an acknowledgment that the political investments of queers of colour, in particular black queers, vary based on generation, commitments to black nationalism(s), as well as the politics of the places they reside. As a result 12 I consider the films in this study as cultural artefacts that reveal historical conversations about the confluence of race, gender, sexuality and nationalism in shaping social realities. In this regard black gay men's cultural production is examined as a site of theoretical practice. This decision to narrow this study specifically to black gay male filmmakers was fraught with some ethical and genealogical questions. The most obvious question is why are there no black lesbian filmmakers discussed in this study? There are two key reasons for limiting the scope of this study to black gay men's filmmaking.

First, discourses about and within the emergent field of black queer studies often refer to the work of these filmmakers specifically. As such to understand what this field imagines itself to be doing both within and outside of academia, it seemed pertinent to examine what the films were seen to be doing theoretically.

Second, the artists themselves emerge out of a tradition of black political thought that can be traced to 1970's black feminist theorizing. Marlon Riggs for instance was a student of renowned poet and black lesbian feminist scholar

Audre Lorde. While this is acknowledged poetically and quite literally in black gay men's cinematic texts, there has been little if any scholarly writing on this genealogy. At present, there is also a concomitant debate about whether black feminist theorizing of difference served as an originary moment of Queer theory

13 more generally. This contested genealogy of black queer thought deserves a study all to itself. So that the reader is clear, it is not the author's intention to conflate black queer filmmaking as being synonymous with the cinematic work of black gay men. On the contrary, by invoking the term "black queer" to describe these works 1 am signalling a set of political investments, artistic practices and sensibilities that cut across gender.

In considering black queer filmmaking as a political act of self-fashioning this study is in alignment with de Certeau's assertion that a paradigmatic shift can occur when one considers historical moments that prompt a rethinking of epistemological investments. The primacy of "race" or "sexuality" as social categories for examination in Black Studies and Queer Studies scholarship is continually contested by the interventions of black queer filmmakers.

Inspired by an impulse toward the self-fashioning of a black queer visibility

Black Queer Studies prompts Black Studies and Queer Studies to reckon with the multiplicity of black subjectivities. In the return to black queer cultural production as a resource, black queer scholarship ensures that the historical interventions of black queer filmmakers are not "laid to rest".

14 Chapter 1 - Isaac Julien: Autography, and The Articulation of Black Queer Thought

[T]he white man, ... had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. - Franz Fanon1

A lesser recited, yet nonetheless insightful statement made by Fanon guides the next stage of this journey. It precedes the much referred to moment in Black Skin, White Masks where Fanon, regarding an occasion in the French metropolis, narrates his experiences of systemic racism as a French Antillean.

Hailed by the address of a young Parisian child proclaiming "Look a Negro!",

Fanon articulates the ironic yet traumatic events. While "making no secret of [his] amusement" at the scene, upon discovering that the tenor shifts from mere excitement by the young child to one of fear of his bodily-presence, Fanon muses on the circumstances that enabled such a response.2 Fanon "already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity", that might engender this moment.3 Images of so-called "African savagery" informing the colonial imagination become not solely a matter of simple fantasy, but rather were projected on actual bodies.

In this scene Fanon "discovers" his "blackness", not of his own volition but through what he surmises is an "objective examination".4 His body displaced,

1 Frantz Fanon, "The Fact Of Blackness," Black Skin, White Masks. (New York: Grove Press, 1967)111.

2 ibid, p. 112

3 ibid, p. 112

15 Fanon is compelled to feel "responsible at the same time for [his own] body, for

[his] race, and for [his] ancestors."5 The encounter elicits an unwarranted and unwelcome response. What we discover in this scene from the outset is the function of narrative in constituting the/h\s black body in Western culture. As

Fanon recounts this moment we, the readers become acutely aware of the coalescence of visual, narrative, and bodily experiences and the manner in which their assemblage informs the expressive cultures of black people in the New

World. In this regard Stuart Hall's insights on Fanon and his influence within contemporary artistic practice are useful.

Autography: A Primer

In his essay "The After-Life ofFrantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why

Black Skin, White Masks?" Stuart Hall captures an historical moment in the late

80s when many black visual artists returned to the insights of Fanon's pivotal work Black Skin, White Masks to inform their representational practices.

Many aspects of Fanon's text guide Hall's re-reading of Black Skin and lead him to propose the notion of "autography" to comprehend the return to

Fanon in late twentieth century artistic production. For the sake of expediency I quote Hall's deeply engaged critique by highlighting three key philosophical ruminations as follows;

i) As a "psychoanalytically-inspired" text, Black Skin, White Masks

4 ibid, p. 112

5 ibid, p. 112 16 establishes a correlation between "racism and what has come to be called the scopic drive - the eroticisation of the pleasure in looking". As an exercise of power "the look" from the place of the "Other" places "race in the field of vision", such that the representation of the black body is fixed in/by "the fantasmatic binary of absolute difference". 6

ii) "The principal counter strategy .. [for artists of the African diaspora is] to bring to the surface - into representation - that which has sustained the regimes of representation unacknowledged: to subvert the structures of 'othering' in language and representation, image, sound and discourse, and thus to turn the mechanisms of fixed racial signification against themselves , in order to begin to constitute new subjectivities, new positions of enunciation and identification, without which the most 'revolutionary' moments of national liberation quickly slide into their post-colonial reverse gear".7

iii) Autography is a practice of "working on the black body itself. As a subjective process, the artist takes "his or her own body as the "canvas"... or "screen", so that the work of translation and re-appropriation is literally a 're-writing of the self on the body', a re-epidermalisation" of the body". 8

Published in 1996, Hall captures the core of a vigorous debate regarding the representation of "blackness" as a signifier for "self", "community", politics, and aesthetics. Preceding Hall, artists such as Isaac Julien inaugurated auto- graphical practices to engage such debates in the realm of cinema. It is of no surprise that filmmakers like Julien oscillate between documentary, biography, memoir, and narrative fiction to produce new cinematic forms that redress the prior disavowal of the experiential knowledge of black gay men. By establishing a variety of "new positions of enunciation" Julien engages in a politics that calls into question the power of interpellative forces that shape black gay men's

6 ibid, pp. 16-17

7 ibid, pp. 19-20

17 position within broader discourses of race-relations, community and national belonging. This is not merely to demonstrate the existence of such forces but also to subvert them. Subversion is ultimately the power of engaging in an auto- graphical practice.

That Isaac Julien, (as well as Riggs) "return to Fanon" through film, as opposed to other visual mediums (e.g. the paintings of Keith Piper upon which

Hall relies) reveals the kind of interventional politics they are engaged in. Filmic texts, because of their mobility, enable an infinite range of possible audiences and responses. The theatre, the classroom, the living room all become sites that are potentially transformed when the unspeakable rears its head through embodied social actors. In this sense filmic texts have the potential to shift social mores in part because with film one does not simply confront the discursive, as one would debate a belief system. Actual bodies hail their audiences to confront the material effects of one's positions such that the audience is called to question their implication in what can/cannot be rendered in the field of representation.

Recalling Hall's important insights regarding the principal counter-strategy of auto-graphical practice, when engaging the film art of Isaac Julien in particular, one must not read their works as simply rendering the invisible visible.

The question of where and how such conversations are staged is also of primary interest to black queer filmmakers. The selection of medium, genre, and style is a primary determinant that will shape an autographical intervention.

ibid, p. 20 18 Guided by the concerns the artists seek to raise, and the audience they seek to reach, such decisions are tactical and varied. Ultimately, as the following explorations of black queer filmmaking will illuminate, an autographical work transforms the mediums and genres chosen by the artist. The re-reading of Isaac

Julien's 1991 feature film Young Soul Rebels that closes this case study will illustrate autography as a method of self-fashioning of black gay male imagery in popular film. In the case of Young Soul Rebels, Julien subverts cinematic genres such as the "heritage film" to insert a black gay male standpoint to comment on dominant discourses of national belonging. To foreground my re­ reading of Julien's text the next section makes a brief detour to highlight the material conditions that preceded its production. In order to grasp the cultural significance of Young Soul Rebels one must first be informed of the economic constraints faced by black queer filmmakers at the time of its production.

The Politics of Autography in/of Young Soul Rebels

One of the most significant contributions of black queer filmmakers like

Isaac Julien has been their sustained critique of black masculinities and "the mythic narratives of communities, and nations" . 9 Through their critique a black queer worldview emerges into a broader dialogue about the role of communitarian discourses in shaping black politics, and intellectual culture.

Much of this crucial work has been conducted through a documentary

9 Rinaldo Walcott, "Isaac Julien's Children: Black Queer Cinema after Looking For Langston," FUSE Magazine vol. 24, n2, July 2001. p. 11 19 practice, which Jackie Goldsby has contended is "the only genre that will acknowledge this world as it is: colored and queer."10 It would appear that Julien's

American counterpart Marlon Riggs concurred with this assumption on some level. In his presentation "Unleash the Queen" at the Black Popular Culture

Conference in 1992, Riggs insinuated that Isaac Julien had potentially become

"pop" with the advent of his first and only feature length film Young Soul Rebels

(1991).u Though Riggs makes this assertion in part to clarify the positions that determine what/whom is "popular" in distinction to "independent", he raises an interesting question. Is documentary film more politically efficacious than other genres? In posing this question, documentary film is automatically privileged as a more authentic source of 'truth' because of its lesser reliance on narrative conventions like fiction. However, in light of the experimental methods that Julien works with we might reframe the question. What kind of political interventions occur when black queer filmmakers defer to narrative conventions of fiction?

Films Studies scholar Kara Keeling, suggests that one significant challenge for black queer filmmakers is the "regime of visibility" that precedes a given text.12 In positing this assessment Keeling draws attention to the financial

10 Jackie Goldsby, "Queens of Language: Paris is Burning," in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar. (Toronto: Between The Lines, 1993) 114.

11 Marlon Riggs, . "Unleash the Queen" in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992) 104.

12 Kara Keeling, ""Joining the Lesbians": Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility," Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 216. 20 limitations that might influence black queer filmmakers' decision to self-fashion black queer images through documentary filmmaking. As a result black queer filmic interventions will be produced with a different set of material and representational concerns. One clear example of Keeling's assertion is the limited resources available to black queer filmmakers to complete projects that might determine the genre they work with. 13 Documentary films are less- expensive to produce. A black queer documentary project has a more viable chance of reaching completion, and subsequent distribution. However, economic concerns are not the sole factor for the historical trend of black queer filmmakers to opt for documentary over other genres. Documentary film is a genre that offers greater autonomy to black queer filmmakers to produce images or content that

Hollywood studios were wary of exploring in the mid 80s, specifically explicit displays of racialized homoeroticism.

It is not coincidental that both Isaac Julien and his American counterparts gained prominence in part because of their relationships with public broadcasting initiatives, such as BBC Channel 4.14 Sustained funding enabled wider distribution so that any future projects attracted significant interest. In tandem with the financial security public broadcasting initiatives offered to black queer

13 ibid, p. 216 - most notably Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust" and Michelle Parkerson's "Litany for Survival" both took several years before their films reached the public, despite their ingenuity and subject matter.

14 Isaac Julien's documentary films were contracted by BBC Channel Four, and Marlon Riggs by PBS. In both instances each filmmaker produced a minimum of 3 films with their respective financial backers. Arguably, this relationship provided the material conditions to experiment with genre and form as they expanded their oeuvres. 21 filmmakers, such initiatives are typically committed to providing programming that reflects the interests and concerns of a diverse audience. The scope of this project does not permit a sustained consideration of these material factors.

However I argue that Julien's feature film is quite significant in this regard because of the financial challenges that black independent filmmakers, especially queer ones, often encounter.

Since an autographical work utilizes the body as screen, the black body in its re-presentation in a cinematic context, especially popular film, will grapple with a set of quandaries specific to the genre. If there is one key thematic in the work of Isaac Julien and the fellow filmmakers with whom he is in dialogue, it is his interest in the discourses that inflect notions of "black community" as audience. In the following section I discuss the cultural context that influenced the representational strategies Julien draws upon in Young Soul Rebels.

Young Soul Rebels and the cultural context of its inception

Young Soul Rebels (1991) emerged in a historical moment which the dominant black cinematic genre of the time was the 'hood film' or a "ghetto aesthetic". ^Characterized by its primary concern with the effects of increased poverty and gang violence in African-American communities, the 'hood' film would shape a misanthropic notion of black masculinity, as hard, tough, and oppositional. Stuart Hall accurately assessed that such enunciations of black

15 Jacquie Jones, "The New Ghetto Aesthetic," Wide Angle vol. 13, n. 3-4 (July-October 1991) 32-43. 22 masculinity often would "claim visibility for their hardness only at the expense of the vulnerability of black women and the feminization of gay black men."16

Julien's artistic and intellectual interest in Frantz Fanon is significant because film allows him to critique these conceptions of black masculinity in a dialogical manner.

In pursuit of this goal Julien draws upon Fanon's insights to establish a psychoanalytic of black audiences. In an interview with Coco Fusco published in

1992 Julien summarizes the intent of his image-making:

Psychoanalytic discourse has been the most successful intervention in developing a critique of the visual dimension of cinema in its attention to fantasy and memory, to spectatorship, gender and sexuality. What we are now developing is a discourse about the Black subject and the visual plane.17

Speaking collectively with fellow filmmaker Martina Atille, Julien's comments reveal the political, and intellectual stakes in his artistic practice. Driven by a dual desire to question the propensity towards realism as an aesthetic, Julien departs by addressing a deeper component of film production and its audiences.

Informed by the statistical knowledge that "40 percent of American film audiences are Black" and consume a variety of films, there was a need to explore "what happens to Black subjectivity when it sees white images".18

The craft of Julien's new vision does not necessarily require the refusal of an "old guard" but rather a critical experimental engagement with the

16 Stuart Hall, "What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture," Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992) 31.

17 Coco Fusco, "Sankofa & Black Audio Film Collective" in Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture, ed. Russel Ferguson. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 23-25. 23 conventions and sensibilities that precedes his texts. Julien's cinematic practice and his interest in Fanononian discourses on black masculinity influence the ambiguous performances of masculinity that are explored in Young Soul Rebels to intervene in multiple realms - visual, textual and psychological. Julien is guided by Kobena Mercer's assessment that Fanon's treatment of black homosexuality in particular "can be taken as a symptom of homophobic fixation and disavowal in the political economy of masculinity in black liberationist discourse."19 Thus Julien is not solely committed to the cultivation of his individual aesthetic, he has a vested interest in the political implications of his representations as the film unabashedly embraced homoeroticism in a manner that had yet to be seen in black independent cinema.

Concurrently with the rise in popularity of the "hood film" genre in black independent filmmaking, the New Queer Cinema would emerge on the cultural scene. The New Queer Cinema, characterized by its avant-gardism and its radical critique of heteronormative representation, would often be criticised for its

"incidental" engagement with questions of "race" and identity.20 Within this moment of cultural production, Young Soul Rebels was a refreshing consideration of the intersections of 'race', gender, sexuality, class and nation.

18 ibid, 24.

19 Kobena Mercer, "Decolonization and Disappointment: Reading Fanon's Sexual Politics," The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996) 125.

20 Jose Esteban Munoz, "Dead White: Notes on the Whiteness of the New Queer Cinema," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 128-129 24 Enter Julien's Motley Crew...

Set in London, England in 1977, Young Soul Rebels follows the lives of two young black men, Chris and Caz, as they negotiate life, love and belonging in the midst of a right wing political climate that figured non-white Britons outside of the national body politic. With the celebration of Queen Elizabeth's Silver

Jubilee as its historical and cultural backdrop, Young Soul Rebels offers an alternative vision of the British nation-state that is at odds with the ethnocentrism that shaped its national imaginary. Chris and Caz run a pirate radio station and their dream is to radically change the cultural landscape of England using the soulful politics of black popular culture.

Driven by a mystery plot, Young Soul Rebels explores the various responses to the murder of a black gay man at the hands of a white male to pose a counter-narrative to the exclusionary politics of community that characterized the time. Prior to 1977 London bore witness to the mass immigration of non-white subjects from former British colonies to the metropolis that significantly altered the ethnic composition of the landscape. With this rise in immigration came a rise in xenophobia and racism among many white Britons.

The crime that opens the narrative is significant, as we are unsure whether racism or homophobia motivated the attack. All the more important is the context in which the crime occurs; T.J. was murdered in a public park known as a site where men sought out anonymous homosexual encounters.

25 Subverting the murder-mystery genre, the film is not really a "who-dun nit?" because the audience gradually ascertains the identity of the perpetrator throughout their engagement with the narrative. What is at stake in Julien's film is the ethical response of both his characters and his audience. Immersed in the lives of the protagonists what we witness are the variety of contradictions that the death of a black gay man poses for them. When news of the murder surfaces in the black community, the immediate response is to associate the crime with a rash of racially motivated attacks initiated by a rising neo-Nazi movement. As the investigation commences it would appear that the police have a different "read" of what took place. Guided by a racist logic, the police assume the murder to be a black-on-black crime and proceed to seek out the perpetrator along those lines.

With the crime still "unsolved", a strain is put on Chris and Caz's relationships. Caz in a particular moment of the film must contend with his brother's black nationalist politics when he (Carlton) vehemently posits that the crime must have been committed by a white man, and if not it must be a "half- caste" - as neither could be trusted in his worldview.

Despite the tension that this crime has engendered, both men find love;

Caz with a white socialist-punk named Billybud, and Chris with a middle-class radio producer named Tracy. Forming a motley crew of sorts, they like others in the nightlife of the soul-boy scene are offered a space to transgress racial/gender/sexual/class lines to form an alternative vision of community and nation. The new forms of relations culminate in the collaborative effort of various

26 factions of the left to produce the "Funk the Jubilee Concert" as a counter response to British ethno-nationalism.

By the denouement of the film we confirm that the murderer was in fact

Ken, a "closeted" white gay male, leaving the audience with a mixed impression.

Julien's decision to depict cross-racial desire in this ambivalent manner is best summed up in his own words;

Racial anxiety is projected onto black subjects in the scopic register. It is the repressed desire for this other that surfaces in violence. In Young Soul Rebels, I try to expose this double repression: the other is both gay and black. If we are to use the language of positive and negative images, at least Young Soul Rebels is a film that uses such images dialectically.21

In this sense the "negative" image of Ken as the "gay-killer", lies in contradistinction to a cross-racial same-sex desire that is not pathological.

Of the substantive academic engagements with Young Soul Rebels interracial desire seems to be the most immediate trope to resonate among scholars. In her examination of racial and erotic anxieties in Fanon, Sonia "Gigi"

Otalvaro-Hormillosa suggests that the murder of T.J. "exposes the dialectic between homophobia and racism as products of the anxieties which are based on the consistent denial of the Others within each subject."22

John Ellis extends this trope to posit that Young Soul Rebels is contending

Isaac Julien, "Black is... Black Aint: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities," Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992) 261-263.

22 Sonia "Gigi" Otalvaro-Hormillosa, "Racial and Erotic Anxieties: Ambivalent Fetishizatio^ From Fanon to Mercer," Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays, ed. John Hawley. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001) 27 with what he terms the "erotics of citizenship". 23 For Ellis, "any relation of belonging or identification will necessarily depend on some component of desire.

However, the structure and content of that desire - the appeal that is made to be a member of the community - will of course differ from nation to nation or community to community."24 Situating Young Soul Rebels within the tradition of the heritage film, Hill posits that the characters embody the figure of the "half- caste". The "half-caste" Hill contends, works as metaphor in Young Soul Rebels for the transgressions that are construed as a betrayal to one's imagined community or nation.25 Indeed each individual if we were to ascribe an appellation would occupy purportedly contradictory positions; Caz (black/gay),

Chris (black/'soft' hetero-masculine), Billy bud (white/socialist/gay), Tracy

(black/female/middle-class).

What is disconcerting is that in figuring the characters through the metaphor of the "half-caste" Ellis misreads the intent of Julien's intervention.

While the characters on the surface signal a collective of "hybrid" identities, their interactions gesture to something more complicated. The designation of "half- caste" or "hybrid" imposes a static state of being on Julien's subjects, as the presumption is that there is in existence two designated social positions that the characters oscillate in between as veritable outcasts.

Jim Ellis, "The Erotics of Citizenship: Derek Jarman's Jubilee and Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels," Southern Quarterly, Vol. 39, N° 4, 2001 , pp. 148-160

ibid, p. 148. 28 As an autographical work, Young Soul Rebels seeks to challenge the dominant codes that would dictate the representation of the characters' realities.

In contest with the prevailing mode of realism within black filmmaking, Julien's narrative presents us with characters that are complex and refuse to be contained as archetypal figures. In other words, each character does not correspond with a preconceived notion of how their lives, or their identities should be narrated. It is in the contradictory positions that his characters occupy that we witness autography at work. Each character to some degree is a work in progress.

Intriguingly, Ellis misses the most pivotal "half-caste" in Julien's narrative, that of T.J. himself. As a character that primarily surfaces in a post-mortem context, T.J. is a figure that traverses the realms of life/death to generate the racial and erotic ambivalences that Young Soul Rebels takes to task. Each juncture in the film where a constructed retelling of the events of his death is made plausible, T.J. asserts himself to provoke the characters to think otherwise.

There is the speculation of whether or not T.J. was cruising, between Caz and

Chris . The audience knows he was. Another key moment is occurs in the assured insistence that it was a racially motivated crime by the men of the barber shop. This position is further complicated by Carlton's assertions that it could have been a "half-caste". Most importantly the audio-recording of the actual events betray the characters' assumptions as well as the audience's

ibid, p. 156. 29 assessment of what has taken place in Julien's narrative.

The final scenes of the film reveal the importance of T.J.'s tape when it surfaces to provide the truth. As Warren Crichlow summarizes the contradictions of the final scene; "even though the murder of young T.J. is solved and avenged, the more organized right wing and skinhead forces completely trash the left [wing] "Funk the Jubilee Concert" concert rally." Rightfully, Crichlow views the ending of the film as potentially "overly optimistic [in] spirit" but nonetheless it confers "that collective starting over is possible and necessary."26

Where I differ with Crichlow is regarding the song that might signal the trajectory of this new vision. Prior to the end credits, the characters re-assemble to the tune of El Coco's Let's Get It Together. In its doubled meaning the song signals a desire for a harmonious collective of like minds to achieve freedom together, yet it is simultaneously a demand for one to "get it together" as in a re- evaluation before such a vision is efficacious. T.J. as a post-mortem character signals the latter in his haunting continual return. The ethical challenge for the characters (and the audience) is not necessarily knowing why his murder occurred, though it is in part that. The greater challenge is reckoning with the political predispositions that might have permitted the event to be remembered mistakenly, if at all. At T.J.'s insistence what remains is a radical potential for heterosocial bonds across the lines of race/gender/class/sexuality to be formed.

26 Warren Critchlow, "Against the Grain: popular music, pedagogy, and cultural politics in the films of Isaac Julien," Discourse: Studies in The Cultural Politics of Education, v16, n3, 1995. p. 397. 30 Ultimately, as for Julien's motley crew, the point of departure is via our political imagination.

It is often assumed that Young Soul Rebels is conversation with Spike

Lee through a comparison of this film to Lee's Jungle Fever (1991). This assessment is congruent with Julien's acknowledgement that Young Soul Rebels

"could be read as a critique of Lee's representation of interracial relationships as both pathological and a threat to the Black middle-class family."27 However, one might find a different thematic or narrative technique that highlights an on-going exchange between the two artists. For example in Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee utilizes chaos as a narrative strategy to engender the moral and political scope of his tale. Like Julien's Young Soul Rebels, Do the Right Thing closes with a comparable moment of civil unrest that poses the ethical question of "what do we do now?" Both filmmakers are guided by an ethical imperative to move their audiences toward a critical dialogue about race-relations in their respective national contexts. The critical distinction between the two films as they reach their denouement is that Young Soul Rebels abandons the notion that a cohesive ethnic or racial community is the solution to racial divisions and civil unrest. Instead Julien provokes his audience to imagine a messy future of interactions between individuals that are not reducible to racial, sexual, or classed affinity.

The direct engagement between Julien and his African-American

31 counterparts such as Spike Lee is significant for our understanding of the intellectual import of Julien's cinematic practice. At the time of Young Soul

Rebels' release Spike Lee was upon a similar ascent as a cultural producer and filmmaker, and solicited equal interest among scholars. This is a notable fact as the initial comparison of these filmmakers representational strategies contributed to a renewal of African-American cultural criticism in the 90's. As I assert in the following section of this case-study, Julien's cinematic interventions challenged

African-American scholars to contend with outer-national perspectives on U.S. race relations.

At this juncture I move from a textual analysis of Julien's cinematic text towards an examination of the critical conversations the text enacted. What is revealed is that an autographical work does not solely engage the realm of artistic representation. In tandem with aesthetic or creative concerns, an autographical work seeks to provoke a paradigmatic shift in the ways knowledge is produced about the racialization of bodies. In pursuit of this goal I briefly revisit a controversy surrounding Julien's film Looking for Langston (1989) to illustrate what is at stake when black queer filmmakers raise the issue of queer visibility and voice as a political imperative for knowledge production.

Young Soul Rebels entered the American scene some two years after his critically acclaimed cinematic meditation on Harlem Renaissance literary figure

Langston Hughes; Looking for Langston (1989). Looking for Langston in its

27 Isaac Julien, "Black is... Black Aint: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities," Black 32 insistence on discussing Hughes homosexuality solicited heated debate amongst academicians as to what falls within the rubrics of Black or African-American studies scholarship. The initial director's cut contained recitations of Hughes' poetry however upon discovering that Julien's film explored Hughes' homosexuality, the executors of Hughes estate filed an injunction to prevent the usage of Hughes poetry in the film. Julien subsequently collaborated with contemporary African-American black gay poet Essex Hemphill to provide the lyrical and poetic texture to the film.28 The significance of this exchange requires some reflection, in part because it reveals the limitations Julien and his collaborator (Hemphill) had to contend with to put forth a black queer revision of communitarian discourses. Looking for Langston was not about Langston

Hughes at all. Rather, the film was a meditation on the historical and textual resources (or lack thereof) that are available to self-fashion a black queer visibility in our contemporary moment. As an iconic black literary figure Langston

Hughes was one of many Harlem Renaissance writers who surfaced in Julien's meditation, including openly homosexual author/critic/poet Richard Bruce

Nugent. That Julien's exploration solicited a controversy I believe was intentional on his part. What was at stake in this intervention was Julien's desire to highlight the parameters of African-American cultural discourses that would historically elide black gay men's differential identifications as simultaneously racially and sexually marginal subjects.

Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992) 263. 33 Of the three filmmakers considered in this study, Isaac Julien is the most theoretically rigorous, and his interests in leftist continental philosophy shape his aesthetic concerns. Shaped by the traditions of third cinema, one is drawn to his aesthetic practice in part because it enables a rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries that often limit intellectual and scholarly engagement. Third Cinema, as characterized by Rinaldo Walcott is "politically savvy ... and unsentimentally challenge^] political orthodoxies of all kinds".29

One such orthodoxy that is challenged by Julien is the presumption that one should be authorized to tell the stories of black and/or queer lives and that national affinity (desired or conferred) should be a prerequisite. This critique though reflected in Julien's cinematic practice, is articulated in his intellectual collaborations as well. Most notably, Julien has worked extensively with Kobena

Mercer on a variety of theoretical projects.30

In tandem with his cinematic practice Julien's intellectual work intervenes in a variety of disciplines; queer theory, post-colonial studies, and black studies.

Julien's position in relation to black studies in particular is best summed up in his own words. "Black cultural theories that are being developed at this particular moment [1980s] are largely limited to the historical traditions which Black people

28 ibid, p 259. 29 Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who?: Writing - Black - Canada. Second edition. (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003) 55

30 For representative works that signal this collaboration see "De Margin and De Centre" Screen 1988 29(4):2-11; and Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. (London: Routledge, 1994.

34 have been participating in and developing and shaping". 31 Julien's comments prompt us to consider the historically ethnocentric stance of black cultural criticism. What Julien seeks to address is the tradition in black cultural criticism to cultivate critical discourses through the exclusion of alternate modes of thought deemed inauthentic, or inapplicable to the study of black culture. In articulating this critique Julien highlights the ideological investments of black studies in the late eighties that stood in stark contrast to the political demands of black queers.

As mentioned before a key theme in these interventions is Julien's focus on the confluence of dominant notions of masculinity, sexuality and racialization in shaping national imaginaries. What is intriguing is that neither Julien, nor

Mercer have ever expressed a desire to categorize their intellectual work under the banner of a "black queer theory", per se. This refusal does not signal a disaffiliation with black gay scholars abroad. On the contrary, driven by an anti- essentialist critique of social categories, Julien (and Mercer) enacts a radical critique of categorization itself. In this context the disciplining of black gay men's theorizing is not immune from critical interrogation.

As such Julien's cinematic practice and his intellectual work mirror each other in terms of the cognitive spaces that they cultivate. Third cinema as a genre that experiments with form in a multi-media, and multi-disciplinary fashion surfaces in many ways as a tangible praxis to mobilize insights that would otherwise be constrained if one were to abide by the rules of a single genre.

31 Coco Fusco, "Sankofa & Black Audio Film Collective" in Discourses: Conversations in 35 Each of the nuanced characters that navigate Julien's cinematic landscape indelibly "stands in" to provide a critique of the propensity to limit ones political imagination by holding steadfast to a singular vision of liberation. In

Julien's vision a white-punk-socialist-queer, a mixed-raced black heterosexual male, a black middle-class woman, and a black queer male purposefully collide with each other to rehearse the possibility of new forms of human existence. As each individual pursues their own place in a social landscape that has figured them as outcasts, they begin to develop the necessary tools to imagine a world that embraces productive conflict as an ethical imperative.

The thematic of collision, and the different social landscape that is produced is instructive for how one might trace the advent of Black Queer

Studies in our present time. Collision as a visceral and altering encounter prompts all parties involved to become aware of the contours that might shape a stable position, regardless of whether that position is abandoned in favour of something else. Julien's work cannot be categorized with ease which often determines the insights that are drawn upon by scholars.

In this chapter we have explored the concept of autography as an artistic practice that reworks the signs, and codes that make the black body intelligible as such in the visual realm. In closing this chapter let us consider a notable moment within the realm of queer filmmaking and its historicisation.

In the 2006 documentary Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema, Isaac

Postmodern Art and Culture, ed. Russel Ferguson. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 24. 36 Julien's "presence" surfaces in recognition of Looking for Langston. The chronological narrative of Fabulous! places Julien as a "queer filmmaker" with an interesting omission of works that preceded and followed Looking for Langston, namely Young Soul Rebels.32 Temporally placed in concert with the arrival of

Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1991), and Marlon Riggs Tongues Untied

(released the same year) it would seem that this time/space signified the only moment when black queer articulations emerged on the cinematic landscape. As the documentary traces the New Queer Cinema's origins, and future trajectory it closes with ruminations about the diversity of queer communities. It is hoped among the various filmmakers and critics interviewed that works expressing the diverse experience of queer yet also racialized, transgendered, and differently- abled individuals will renew the genre.33

The omission of Young Soul Rebels in this narrative served as an impetus for me to consider Julien as a pinnacle artist-intellectual in the development of

Black Queer Studies. Young Soul Rebels was the first feature-length fictional film to be produced by an openly black queer filmmaker that articulated an anti- homophobic, non heteronormitive, anti-racist politics. If one were to defer to the chronology of Fabulous, such an intervention only occurred with the release of

Isaac Julien's films Passion of Remembrance and Darker Side of Black emphatically embrace an anti-homophobic politics, which is constant in how Julien engages the realm of representation.

33 B.Ruby Rich and Patrick-Ian Polk's comments in the film adequately express this desire regarding the "future" of Queer cinema. See Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema, dir. Lisa Ades & Leslie Klainburg. Orchard Films (2006). 37 Patrick-Ian Polk's Punks (2000). M

In claiming Looking for Langston as the sole work that signals Julien's contribution to the history of Queer cinema, Fabulous defines the genre, and historical studies of queer filmmaking in a particular way which elides the critical work of black queer filmmakers.

In as much as it addressed black audiences, Young Soul Rebels called upon white queers (gay men in particular) to question their tenuous identification with a politics solely based on sexual-minority status. Julien's characters Caz and

Billybud, in particular, both fall outside of what an imagined queer community would/should look like. The contours of that "community" are visualized in

Young Soul Rebels through the fetishization of Caz's blackness in a scene at a local gay pub by a middle class white gay male who at once objectifies Caz and simultaneously repudiates that desire by insisting that he doesn't "do 'dinge'"35

Julien's unsentimental provocation of white queers to acknowledge that the logics of racism and homophobia work in tandem to produce subjectivities may in part explain why Langston is canonized in Fabulous!, as opposed to

Young Soul Rebels. Though the following assertion is speculative, one can

See Punks, dir. Patrick-Ian Polk. Tall Skinny Black-Boy Productions. 2000. Punks is a feature length film that presented audiences with primarily black gay male protagonists. Considering the dearth of films in the American film industry that explore black queer subjectivities, Punks is symbolic in that its emergence enabled American audiences to engage the subject matter while imagining a certain "newness". 35 "Dinge" is a term that when uttered is done so to signify an aversion to the sexual desire for a "non-white Other". In particular, though the etymology requires more exploration, it is a racializing term that interpellates black male bodies as abject. See Robert Reid-Pharr's insights in his essay "Dinge," Black Gay Man: Essays. (New York: NYU Press, 2001) 85-98. 38 surmise that Langston is easily claimed because it does the historical work of placing a racialized subject within a historical narrative of queer visibility and presence that is presumed to transcend the implications of raciological thinking in shaping a queer imaginary.

This quagmire of contested identifications among audiences (be they critics, scholars, or simply consumers) and how they decipher black queer texts serves as a tangible context to consider in order to understand the utility of autography. As a method of self-fashioning of black images, autography enables black queer filmmakers to engage questions of representation in the visual realm, that are reproduced in everyday life. The example of the historical narrative of

Fabulous! serves as a case in point. By reworking visual representations of black bodies Julien utilizes cinema to enunciate black queer realities that unsettle positions grounded in a desire for universality as a basis for politics. Young Soul

Rebels does not exemplify this vision and instead antagonizes black and queer community discourses and politics from without.

In the following chapter the examination of Marlon Riggs' legacy for black queer scholars mines this terrain to explore what happens when the insights of black queer cultural production become institutionalized.

39 Ch. 2 Marlon Riggs and "our" Historical Routes

Our need to be exemplary bodies sprang from the history of radical denial of exemplary function to black gay bodies at the intersection of two kinds of community that seem so often to carve each other out of perceptual existence: a tacitly racist white gay community for whom a black queer body, however eroticised, might stand as a representative of blackness but could never be seen to stand for queerness itself, and a more or less openly homophobic African-American community by whom the queerness of any black figure must be denied, suppressed, or overridden for that figure to be allowed to function as an embodiment of black identity or struggle.

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1

Sedgwick's reflections - as an expression of re-memory and as a cognitive map - provide a different avenue to think about the politics of black queer filmmaking. The scene: University of North Carolina - a protest in 1991 challenging the local PBS station's refusal to air Marlon Rigg's third film Tongues

Untied (1990). The issue at stake as Sedgwick recollects was the 'silencing' of

"the first film on the almost genocidally underrepresented topic of black gay men in the United States."2 At the core of the debate, was whether Riggs' film was too

"explicit" for public television. In addition the film was utilized by the far Right to debate the funding practices of the National Endowment for the Arts. Riggs' himself stated there was "another purpose behind the "obscenity" rhetoric".

Ultimately, he thought, the rhetoric served as "a pretext for silencing a disenfranchised minority's attempt to end its subjugation and challenge the

1 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2003. p. 28

2 ibid, 28 40 cultural terms of the majority's control."3 Indelibly, it was the terms under which such challenges were made that were at stake.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the politics of black queer filmmaking in regards to Marlon Riggs Tongues Untied as a pivotal text that arguably ushered in the black gay and lesbian film movement.4 I then provide a re-reading of Marlon Riggs oeuvre to posit that Tongues Untied and its significance is better understood as part of larger interrogation of representational politics. The later sections in this chapter explore the various trajectories taken by black queer scholars in the U.S. to mobilize the politics of his art, in particular the divergent and complementary insights of Dwight McBride,

E. Patrick Johnson, and Robert Reid-Pharr regarding what is at stake in proposing a Black Queer Studies. Each scholar has a differential set of intellectual investments that reveal the impossibility of defining the field as a definitive body of theoretical work. All however, are committed to a praxis that fervently engages in a politics of social justice.

Autography, Marlon Riggs, and the politics of black queer filmmaking

3Riggs, Marlon. "Tongues re-tied?" Current Aug. 12, 1991. http://www.current.ora/proq/proq114q.html

4 The term "black gay and lesbian film movement" captures a desire to historicize the emergence of filmmakers that produce(d) images that were by/for/about this community. The naming of this moment as a 'movement' is itself a political act, as the drive behind such image making was to directly respond to the lack of images of black Igbt persons' realities. When I refer to black queer filmmaking I am referring to a praxis. See Kara Keeling, ""Joining the Lesbians": Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility," Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), and Michelle Parkerson, "Birth of a Notion: Towards Black Gay and Lesbian Imagery in Film and Video," Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and 41 One of the most prominent strategies of an autographic work is to develop new artistic forms that expose the "regimes of representation" that have previously remained "unacknowledged".5 Not surprisingly Riggs' first feature- length film Ethnic Notions (1986) did just that in its taking to task the history of racist stereotype in American popular culture. Riggs' text was screened at film festivals and subsequently became one of three of his films that would air nationally on PBS.

Based on the success of an Emmy award for Ethnic Notions, Riggs' had established a formidable relationship with PBS. This relationship would enable

Riggs to 'weather the storm' that followed the airing of Tongues Untied in 1991.

His third film for PBS, Color Adjustments (1992) would air the following year. In

1993, Riggs directed No Regret (1993), an examination of the impact of the

HIV/AIDS on black gay men during the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1994 PBS would air Riggs final film Black is... Black Aint (1994) which was a meditation on black American identity and community formation. Black is Black Aint was completed posthumously as Riggs passed away during the production of the film due to AIDS-related complications.

What is interesting to me is the gap between Riggs' premiere work and

Color Adjustments which was dubbed as the follow up film to Ethnic Notions. It is

Pratibha Parmar. (Toronto: Between The Lines, 1993)

5 Stuart Hall, "The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?" The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996) 19 42 during this time that Riggs completed his short film Affirmations (1990) which would evolve into Tongues Untied (1990). A trend among many scholars of

Riggs oeuvre has been to single out Tongues Untied and Black is... Black Aint as the works that are exemplary of black queer cinematic practice. Film and Media scholar Kara Keeling stands out as one such scholar who posits this assertion.

In her essay "Joining the Lesbians: Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian

Visibility", Kara Keeling has recently suggested that the emergence of Tongues

Untied on the cultural scene can be taken as an inaugural moment for "black gay and lesbian film" more generally. While Keeling is primarily concerned with black

lesbian filmmaking, the most significant of her insights lie in her rendering of what she terms "regimes of visibility".6 Placing the emergence of Black queer filmmaking in context, Keeling posits that one guiding force behind the movement is the dearth of representations that enact a veritable "silencing" of black queer voices.7 However, Keeling cautions us to consider another facet of this dilemma.

As she further suggests, though "the emergence of a black lesbian and gay film movement puts into circulation images of .. [their] existence that duel with existing stereotypes and untie tongues regarding the range of [their] historical experiences... continuing to rely on a celebratory notion of visibility that is counterposed positively to a binary opposite ("invisibility') reduces the

6 Kara Keeling, ""Joining the Lesbians": Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility," Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology ed. E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 216

7 ibid, p. 215 43 complicated critique inherent in [the practice itself]."8

Indeed, to presume that the mere fact of 'visibility' is what constitutes the political force of black queer filmmaking allows it to become a novelty, rather than a profound intervention. It is this potential that prompts Kobena Mercer to posit that "black gay image-making" is profound not because of "who or what [the artists] are, but because of what they do and, above all, because of the freaky- deke way in which they do it."9

In as much as I concur with both Keeling and Mercer's assessments of the emergence of the black gay and lesbian film movement, I consider Tongues

Untied from a different vantage point. Mercer is correct in positing that the importance of black queer filmmaking is the way in which filmmakers "do it", my intention in the following re-reading of Riggs' oeuvre is to establish how he accomplishes a self-fashioning of black queer images through a process of autography. My contention in the following section is that a juxtaposition of

Tongues Untied with Ethnic Notions and Colour Adjustments reveals that

Tongues Untied in as much as it enunciated black queer subjectivities was part of Riggs' larger interrogation of the historical representation of black bodies.

From Ethnic Notions to Black is... Black Ain't - Marlon Riggs' Legacy

From the beginning of Ethnic Notions the audience becomes acutely

8 ibid, p. 217

9 Kobena Mercer, "Dark & Lovely: Black Gay Image Making," Welcome to the Jungle: New 44 aware of the ominous tone of its subject matter. The film traces the emergence of racist representation beginning with the popular form of minstrelsy.

Juxtaposing images of collectibles with performance art, as well as early cinematic representation of black bodies, Riggs establishes the continuity between minstrelsy and the advent of American cinema in promulgating racist images of black (American) bodies. Riggs argues that the thread that ties these varying artistic forms together is the insistence on preconceived ideas about whatAvho black people are in the American imagination.

Echoing Patricia Hill Collins notion of "controlling images" Riggs sets out to expose not simply the history of derogatory images of black bodies but their utility in shaping the American imagination,10 which is the goal of the film and is key to understanding the interventions offered. Ethnic Notions explores caricatures of black bodies that have retained currency since the nineteenth century: Sambo, Mammy, Uncle Tom, and the Pickaninnie. Through this exploration Riggs brought to the surface "the ambiguous emotional attachments that [kept] such stereotypes alive in the hearts and minds of those who would repudiate them, blacks and whites alike." Thus the film allowed for "a deeper understanding of the way images unconsciously affect identities."11

We might ask whether encountering this violent history of representation

Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994) 222.

10 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990) 68.

45 prompts a re-evaluation of identity that is not limited to 'race'? Indeed, the caricatures of 'blackness' that would proliferate the stages and screens of

American popular culture were very complex figurations of 'race', class, gender and sexuality. The archive(s) that Riggs re-assembles and disseminates broadens the terrain of the conversation about the 'positive' or 'negative' implications of these representations, and they challenge prevalent notions of normative gendered and sexual identifications in shaping racist stereotype. An example of this would be the figure of "the Mammy" who would represent a

'masculinised' femininity in contradistinction to an idealized (white) femininity and an 'impotent' masculinity in the figure of "the Sambo". In short, a gender performance "gone wrong".

Most strikingly, in its exposition of racist caricature Ethnic Notions poses a very different set of challenges to the televisual project overall. As Phillip Brian

Harper notes; "broadcast TV... constitutes a relatively discrete culture characterized not only by the manifestation of various distinctive features, but conversely, by the exclusion of certain elements whose eventual admission to the realm must figure as a significant intervention."12

Within this dynamic, Riggs' insistence on highlighting the absolute absurdity of racist caricature has a dual agenda. Ethnic Notions is at once an exposition of the images themselves, and also an indictment of the progenitors of

11 Kobena Mercer, "Black is ... Black Ain't" Sight and Sound. Vol. 4, Issue no. 8. pp. 22-23.

12 Phillip Brian Harper, "Marlon Riggs: The Subjective Position of Documentary Video". Art 46 such representations, and the "authority" conveyed upon image makers and television network executives to shape popular imaginations.

That such an intervention takes place via the circuits of broadcast television, is significant here. There is obviously the expanded audience the medium enables. Moreover, the medium itself is strategically transformed. As

Harper further illuminates broadcast television, is "predicated on installation, and any effective challenge to its norms will thus register not primarily as "art", but as an innovation in the programming that defines the televisual project."13

In this regard, although Ethnic Notions differs in form and subject matter from Tongues Untied, the overarching concern for Riggs was to interrupt the normative assumptions that dictate what and who should be accessible to us in the most intimate of settings - the "home". One could go so far to suggest, as I do, that Ethnic Notions in many ways sets the stage for Tongues Untied. After exposing the disregard shown towards marginalized groups by a variety of industries, a film that would insist on black gay men's self representation as a political corrective, becomes all the more palpable.

That the broadcast of Color Adjustments (1992) would follow the controversy that overshadowed the innovations that Tongues Untied established is quite telling of the regime of visibility Riggs sought to subvert and transform.

One general theme that shaped the debate surrounding black gay men's self- representation was the utility of documentary itself. The guiding presumption of

Journal. Winter 1995. p. 69. 47 documentary filmmaking is that it must be above all informative. In tandem with this narrow conception of documentary film, a contradictory and vitriolic response would surface in terms of the facticity of the content itself. During an interview following a broadcast of Tongues Untied in July of 1991, a PBS moderator framed the dialogue by insisting that same-sex practices did not occur

"on his [read: black] block" as a way to discredit the experiential knowledge articulated in the film. 14 It would appear that the veritable "shock" that fuelled such a response was that Tongues Untied was too informative. For the first time in American television history black queer enunciations were made available to an American audience that either did not want to, could not comprehend images of racialized homosexuality.

Re-framing the televisual experience Riggs' greatest accomplishment in

Tongues Untied is the assemblage of a bevy of images that historicize the multi- faceted nature of oppression faced by black gay men. The most profound scene is one reminiscent of a Fanonian interpellation, where Riggs explicitly critiques the facticity of "being" black by coupling it with the forces that "queer" a body.

The scene is unsettling in it Riggs recounts the multiple forces that imposed themselves on his "body" proper. As he recalls his childhood sexual experimentation Riggs juxtaposes the images of two figures that serve to

13 ibid, p. 69.

14 Marlon Riggs, "Unleash the Queen," Black Popular Culture ed. Gina Dent. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992) 100-102.

48 represent the variety of positions that would seek to "produce" his body as non-

normative: 'the "brother" in the "hood"', and 'the redneck'.

Translating his own poetic piece to the screen, Riggs simultaneously

critiques interpellate forces, while at the same time documenting the potential for subversion within such a scene. The poem that inspired the scene appears as

a "script" for the video in its original form:

I'd heard my calling by age 6 We had a word for boys like me. (Punk) Punk not because I played sex with other boys- everybody on the block did that. (Punk) But because I didn't mind giving it away. (Punk) Other boys traded-"you can have my booty if you gimme yours"- But I gave it up, free, (Punk) At age 11 we moved to Georgia. I graduated to new knowledge. (Homo) "Don't you know how to kiss?" my new best friend asked, (Homo) "No," I answered "I'll show you how," he said, his brown eyes inviting. (Homo) We practiced kissing for weeks, dry, wet, French. (Homo) 'Til his older brother called us a name. (Homo) "What's a 'homo'?" I asked. "Punk, faggot, freak." I understood. We stopped kissing. Best friend became worst enemy.

(Muthafuckin coon) Age 12, they bused me to Hepzibah Junior High on the outskirts of Augusta. (Muthafuckin coon) A spray-painted sign greeted me on the wall. (Niggers Go Home) (Muthafuckin coon) Rednecks hated me because I was one of only two blacks placed in 8A, the class for Hepzibah's 15

Highlighting these forces but at the same time breaking the 'silence' by

putting the trauma on display, Riggs hails his audience to confront an embodied

personage. In re-citing the poem with embodied "speakers" Tongues Untied

ultimately complicates the notion that the experience of racism and homophobia

can be reduced to individual perception. At the closing of the scene the wounding

15 Arthur Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, "Black Gay Male" Discourse: Reading Race and Sexuality between the Lines," Journal of the History of Sexuality. Vol. 3, No. 3, (Jan. 1993), 481-484. 49 words of "Punk", "Faggot", "Nigger Go-Home", "Uncle Tom", "Mother Fuckin'

Coon" emerge on the screen as a cacophony wherein the material forces and effects are indistinguishable from each other. Indeed Riggs may have been too informative, as prior to Tongues Untied, nothing emerged on the televisual screen that represented a pronouncement of black queer realities that was enunciated by black queer individuals.

Color Adjustments would emerge with a set of paratextual concerns as a result of the controversy over Tongues Untied. I encourage readers to assess

Colour Adjustments as a tangential response to conversations about "positive" imagery in American television. Reading Color Adjustments in relation to Riggs previous work illuminates the transformative impulse in his overall project. Color

Adjustments maintained an attentive focus on the presumed "value" inherent in the visibility of black realities on television through the situation comedy formula.

Yet, in conjunction with this examination a self-referential consideration is also ushered in.

Riggs' central question of what constitutes "positive" or "negative" representations of 'blackness' ultimately critiqued the heteronormative constructions of "family", "community", and "equality" that were prevalent within

African-American discourse of the time. It is difficult to separate Tongues Untied from this debate. Indeed, the presumption that self-articulation must be constrained by a notion that the art might solicit disapproval was a debate that

Tongues Untied sought to dismantle and reframe. Though Riggs returns to a

50 more recognizable documentary form with Color Adjustments, these questions and concerns are constant throughout his oeuvre.

Riggs' final feature-length film Black Is... Black Ain't (1994) with its sense of urgency would reposition these debates. The following section offers an exploration of Dwight McBride's mobilization of Riggs oeuvre, and black gay men's cultural production in order to establish a version of Black Queer Studies.

Black Studies/Queer Studies - convergences and extrapolations

One of the significant contributions of black gay men's cultural production

(literary and cinematic) to the field of Black Studies was the articulation of multiple subject-positions that complicated the notion that a unitary black subject exists to be studied by its practitioners. Similar to the interventions posed by black feminist scholarship in the 70s, black gay men's artistic work challenged the predisposition of primarily heterosexual male scholars to shape the field of

Black Studies vis-a-vis their own world view.

In his essay "Toward The New Black Studies, Or Beyond the Old Race

Man", Dwight McBride provides an informative genealogy of this phenomenon within the field. Taking issue with the primacy of "race" as a privileged category of social analysis in Black Studies, McBride contextualizes the institutional forces that might impel Black scholars to draw certain exclusionary contours around the field. As McBride surmises:

[T]he institutional rise of African American studies necessitated the primacy

51 of race politics with regard to its embattled and contested institutional status. It is often the case that in institutional warfare, so to speak, institutions reduce and simplify the identities of the subjects they interpellate. The political privileging of race politics on the institutional level, in this context, had the effect of privileging the category of race in the intellectual identity of African-American studies.16

McBride's assessment reveals the external forces that might influence the scope of the field of Black Studies. Despite this institutional pressure, McBride suggests that innovations have always occurred to renew the field. Revisiting

Wahneema Lubianno's assessment of the field, McBride concurs with her characterization of Black/African-American Studies as

a name for the institutionalization of a set of imperatives, approaches, political engagements, and privileged "interdisciplinariness" as paradigms and sites for counter-hegemonic cultural work. Historically, intellectuals involved in Afro-American Studies have seen their work as explicit and implicit interruptions (or attempts to interrupt) the traditional academic strangleholds on knowledge categories. The object of their interventions is to change the world by means of demystifying the relationship of "knowledge" producers to "knowledge," as well as to foreground the connection between "culture" and Afro-American "everyday life."17

Extending Lubianno's insights regarding the interstices between

Black/African-American studies and Cultural Studies in particular, McBride posits that the emergence of Black Queer Studies is better contextualized when considered as part of "pattern of continual reconstitution". 18 Black Feminism,

Literary Deconstruction, Cultural Studies and Queer Theory can all be seen as interlocutory forces that impel this "continual reconstitution" of Black Studies.

Dwight McBride, "Toward The New Black Studies, Or Beyond the Old Race Man," Journal of Black Studies Vol. 37 No. 3, January 2007 441-444

17 Wahneema Lubiano, "Mapping the interstices between Afro-American cultural discourseand cultural studies: A prolegomenon," Callaloo, 79(1), 1996, pp 68-77.

52 In this sense "the arrival on the scene of Black queer studies should neither shock nor surprise. In fact, the work of [James] Baldwin, in the context of such a rendering of the evolution of African-American studies, would make his prophetic call for a Black queer studies a near inevitability."19

In this sense, rather than considering black queer intellectual work as an intervention that surfaces from the outside, McBride situates this scholarship as an historical example of Black scholarly innovation. Thus, in shaping the field of

Black Queer Studies, McBride considers black gay men's literary and cinematic contributions as providing a "usuable past" for the renewal of the black studies project. McBride's co-edited anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African-American Fiction (2002) as well as his edited volume

James Baldwin Now (1999) signal this search for literary artefacts and criticism that would engender this renewal of Black Studies.20

In constituting Black Queer Studies in this manner, McBride inadvertently elides a similar trajectory of Queer Studies that might add nuance to our understanding of the role institutional forces play in shaping these respective fields. If the institutionalization itself is implicated in simplifying the identities that both Black Studies and Queer studies purportedly represent, it would seem that

18 ibid, p 444

19 ibid, p 444

20 Devon Carbado, Dwight McBride, & Don Weise ed. Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African-American Fiction. ("San Francisco: Cleis Press 2002) and Dwight McBride, ed. James Baldwin Now (New York: NYU Press, 1999) 53 an ongoing analysis of these interpellate forces may be beneficial for the longevity of Black Queer Studies. E. Patrick Johnson's similar intervention in positing "Quare Studies" and "Quare Theory" attempts to take on this work. In the following consideration of Johnson's contributions to Black Queer Studies a different trace of the origins of the field is highlighted.

Is "Quare Studies" still "quare" by another name?

Despite the critique put forth in this chapter, there is a congruence between my position and those of Keeling, and Johnson in regards to their engagements with black queer filmmaking. Our positions coalesce in a larger understanding that artistic practice engages with and establishes a set of critical methods that often precede academic innovation. For Keeling this critical offering is characterized as "mining the terrain of the invisible... to direct the legacy of queer historical and theoretical projects toward assisting in the valorization of organizations of sexuality capable of sustaining forms of sociality that provide ways of transfiguring currently oppressive and exploitative relations."21 Though not formally naming itself as a "field of study", Keeling's vision is commensurate with that of E. Patrick Johnson.

Johnson, in returning to Riggs oeuvre, articulates a more comprehensive vision of the work to be done. As a veritable manifesto Johnson's essay " "Quare"

Studies: Or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My

21 ibid, p. 218 54 Grandmother" takes to task the elision of black bodies of knowledge in the Queer

Studies project.22 For Johnson, the "invalidation of 'experience' " as a source of knowledge is one key trend within Queer Theory that he argues contributes to

Queer Studies failure to focus on the materiality of queer lives.23 As an ethical move, "Quare" Studies positions itself as a more utilitarian practice such that the work is applicable "on the front lines, ... where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed - indeed, when the body is a site of trauma."24

As such, Johnson's vision of "Quare" Studies is a comprehensive project that entwines an analysis of 'race', class, gender and sexuality. Likening such a project to the "gumbo" that serves as a metaphor in Riggs text for 'blackness',

Johnson mobilizes Rigg's film to make a didactic critique of African-American discourse and Queer Theory, simultaneously. Drawn to Riggs' "de- essentializing" practice, Johnson ultimately proposes that "Quare" Studies like the gumbo enables an expansive, all-encompassing, improvisational practice that is continually " in the process of becoming , but nonetheless is."25 The issue

Johnson contends is that certain key aspects of sociality have fallen out of the

'pot' that metaphorically is Queer Studies.

22 E. Patrick Johnson, "Quare" Studies: Or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother," Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology ed. E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 124-157.

23 ibid, p 131

24 ibid, p129

55 What is troubling to me is the closing of this treatise whereupon Johnson asserts a return to what he terms "homeplace" as the site where a set of critical material interventions must be staged. Drawing on the insights of bell hooks,

Johnson posits that "homeplace" is the site wherein people of colour "live out the contradictions of our lives... [but it also] provides a place from which to critique oppression."26 My wariness is with Johnson's deploying of "homeplace" without recognizing a set of contradictions in the very notion of "home" itself. The notion of "homeplace" as Johnson posits it is not a romantic one. Yet the question of diaspora identifications, mobilities and displacements are seemingly overlooked.

This is apparent in the peculiar manner in which Johnson engages with diaspora discourse via Paul Gilroy to suggest that a "quare" position "takes

"being" and "becoming" [as] sites of performance and performativity." "Being" as

Johnson suggests is "a site of infinite signification as well as bodily and material presence... [wherein] "blackness" as discourse" is embodied through the conjoining of "discourse and flesh .. in performance".27

What does not surface in Johnson's articulation is that the very 'fleshy discourses' he speaks of cannot easily be claimed as 'indigenous' to the U.S. context. The question of nation, region, language and discourse become paramount in this regard. Johnson's "quare" in its attempt to "carve" a cognitive space "by and for" queers of color is rooted in a presumption of bounded national

25 ibid, p. 149

26 ibid, p. 148 56 ties and affinities. Johnson's linguistic move to define the scope of his project as

"quare" is not a merely semantic. By default it negates and obscures the

"boundarylessness" of black queer discourse itself. Black Canada, Black Britain, seem to "fall off the map" in Johnson's vision of "quare". Prior to, and in the wake of the black lesbian and gay film movement, political visions and grammars were already being shaped through a transnational practice. Shah Frilot's documentary Black Nations, Queer Nations? (1996) exists as a historical testament to this claim as the film captures the presence and interaction of black queers from Toronto, Canada (poet Courtnay Macfarlane), the U.K.

(scholar/critic Kobena Mercer), and U.S. based poet/activist Essex Hemphill to name a few. Thus the naming of "Quare" Studies, as such, limits the scope to a geopolitical and linguistic specificity.

The material experiences of queers of color may acquire voice through a differential set of linguistic registers, despite their migratory histories, or lack thereof. This is made poignantly clear in Tongues Untied wherein "the Snap", vogueing, "Aga" all exist as different linguistic/discursive forms that are regional yet are mobile and transportable when queers of color encounter each other in undefined and/or transitory contact zones.28 The contention here is that notwithstanding the radical potential of "Quare" Studies, one must also consider that its grammars must be augmented to consider the movement of bodies and

27 ibid, p . 145

28 For more on black queer discursive practice see: Marcos Becquer, "Snaplthology and Other 57 concerns that a diaspora population brings to the table. The elision of diasporic voices within Johnson's vision of "Quare" Studies will be explored further in the next chapter.

Once You Go Black... a cautionary tale

With these divergent conceptualizations of Black Queer Studies, Robert

Reid-Pharr stands out as an interesting figure. Opting for an intellectual praxis that seeks to explore the "boundary-lessness" that black and queer artists and authors come to represent, Reid-Pharr is one of few scholars that express an ambivalence towards the Black Queer Studies project. In his volume of essays

"Black Gay Man: Essays", Reid-Pharr posits that first and foremost his scholarship seeks to "dismantle the American identity machine."29 Taking to task the "outmoded binaristic identitarian discourses: black/white, gay/straight, man/woman," that have been critiqued by queer theory, ethnic studies, and feminist scholarship, Reid-Pharr ultimately is interested in the forces that impel a black queer subject to enter the terrain of academic discourse as such. Once

You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual is a continuation of Reid-Pharr's engagement with African-American literary criticism and Queer Theory wherein the divergences, and complementarity of the two enterprises are explored. In a similar fashion, it is in this recent study that Reid-

Pharr speaks directly about the emergence of black queer studies. Reid-Pharr's

Discursive Practices in Tongues Untied". Wide Angle, vol. 13, no. 2 (April 1991) 6-17.

58 speculations about what can be achieved in proposing the idea of Black Queer

Studies are instructive and provide the perfect segue way into the next case- study:

One of the ways in which black and gay people have been allowed to be seen within American popular culture is precisely as sentinels at a doorway that leads directly back to some of our most retrograde notions about country and culture. Thus I would say that if there is to be a Queer Black Studies, and I place my emphasis on the word "if, then it must necessarily be corrosive. It must approach with the greatest of trepidation notions such as innocence, tradition, community, and home. And if we are called upon to carry our small lights into the darkness of American Studies, let us always be mindful that those sparklers, lovely, bright, and festive as they are, do, in fact burn.30

What is signalled in Reid-Pharr's cautionary tale is that the field of Black

Queer Studies must be attentive to the discursive, and material forces of

American nationalism that are implicated in its necessity. The inclination towards a "corrosive" practice is reminiscent of Isaac Julien's autography in that Reid-

Pharr is ultimately challenging all of us to critically interrogate the identities that a

Black Queer Studies imagines it will speak on behalf of. Perhaps the political stakes in black queer theoretical enterprises are less about cultivating an intellectual arena to celebrate black queer identities. The larger task may very well be to hold accountable those institutions (academic, religious, political) that promulgate conceptions of sociality that render certain lives as "unliveable". In the final chapter we shall explore this ethical question by considering the documentary filmmaking Edimburgo Cabrera. Through an examination of

Cabrera's diasporic affiliations that resonate in his filmmaking, we shall consider

29 Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: NYU Press, 2001) 1.

30 Robert Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual. 59 Rinaldo Walcott's call for a black queer diaspora studies.

(New York: NYU Press, 2007) 168. 60 Ch. 3 "Usable Routes": Edimburgo Cabrera and The Movements of Black Queer Studies

What is demanded is a rethinking of community that might allow for different ways of cohering into some form of recognizable political entity. Put another way, we must confront singularities without the willed effort to make them cohere into a oneness; we must struggle to make a community of singularities of which the unworking of the present ruling regime, a regime that trades on myths of homogeneity, must be central. In short, a different sociality is required - a sociality of mutual recognitions. -RinaldoWalcott,1

In his essay Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the

Diaspora, from which the opening epigram is taken, Rinaldo Walcott proposes a different trajectory for a black queer studies project. Resisting an argument of inclusion (specifically of Black Canada), Walcott situates his vision by capturing the "borderless, large world of shared identifications and imagined historical relations produced through a range of fluid artefacts, like film.." that enable what he terms a black queer diaspora.2 The contention here is that black diaspora queers "have been interrupting and arresting the black studies project to produce a bevy of identifications, which confound and complicate local, national, and transnational desires, hopes and disappointments of the post-Civil Rights and post-Black Power era."3 Read in tandem with McBride's assertion that Black

Studies is marked by "a pattern of continual reconstitution", Walcott's critically inflected cognitive map of the field would seem to Tall in line'. However,

Rinaldo Walcott, "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora," Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology ed. E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 93

ibid, 92 61 resembling the praxis of Robert Reid-Pharr, Walcott navigates a variety of intellectual terrains to examine their constitution, and the political implications they might have for engendering more equitable forms of human existence. In calling upon a "collision" of black studies, diaspora studies, and queer studies a tacit challenge is made by Walcott to these respective fields to re-imagine the subjects on whose behalf they are labouring .

In posing this intervention Walcott seeks to un-moor black queer theorizing from the impulses of the black studies project that "attempt to correct current and historical wrongs and produce a relation to knowledge production that is irreducible to the so-called lived experience of a homogenized blackness or black community."4

In a somewhat distinct fashion from that of Johnson's vision of "Quare"

Studies, a black queer diasporic position seeks to ensure the political efficacy of the field of Black Queer Studies, by pre-empting its nationalist leanings. This strategic move arises out of an anticipatory impulse that imagines a socio political landscape wherein the continual movement of black queer bodies ultimately call into question a politics that insists on a presumption of sameness.

The documentary filmmaking of Edimburgo Cabrera encapsulates this desire to anticipate political imperatives brought about by the migration of queer subjects who must negotiate different national contexts. Whether this migration is

ibid, 92

62 compelled by state-repression of gender dissent or alternative performances of sexual identity, Cabrera's documentaries provide a different trajectory for thinking about rights, belonging and community that is pertinent to the concerns of the project at hand. As a Cuban gay-male of African descent residing in Canada,

Cabrera's affiliations with both Anglophone black queers, and a broader Latino/a queer community signal the productive messiness of diaspora politics.

In this examination of Cabrera's filmmaking our interest does not lie solely in the narratives his subjects impart about themselves. Our goal is to consider the films within the broader context of what black queer theorizing imagines as its political imperatives. In the following discussion of Cabrera's films Divas: Love

Me Forever (2002) and Latin Queens: Unfinished Stories of Our Lives (2000) attention is drawn to the diasporic affiliations that reside among Cabrera's subjects, and also Cabrera himself. Reading the political contexts of the films alongside each other it is argued that Cabrera's films call for a consideration of what I suspect are "usable routes" for black queer theorizing. Beginning with a reading of Cabrera's Latin Queens I return to the politics of 'homeplace" as posited by E. Patrick Johnson to illuminate the potential limits of "Quare Studies".

Unfinished Stories

Drawing on the documentary style of Marlon Riggs, Edimburgo Cabrera's

Latin Queens captures the outer-national affilations, and diasporic identifications

4 ibid, 93. 63 that shape a gay latino community in Toronto, Canada.

As the film opens we are introduced to an un-named subject who addresses the audience through his wounded body. The camera scans - at his direction - over the wounds inflicted as a result of police brutality in El Salvador

(1998). Welts on buttocks, knees, chest, are officially documented with the jarring punctuation of the sounds of the flogging that inflicted the wounds. The person who introduces this film is seeking asylum in Canada because as a queer male living in El Salvador he is literally endangered.

As we engage with this subject's narration of the violent and traumatic conditions he is enduring the audience comes to realize that the images we are bearing witness to have not been made by the filmmaker. The video is self-made and is to be sent to a human rights lawyer who specializes in refugee claims based on sexual orientation in Canada. With the assistance of a Toronto based gay men's organization Hola: Grupo Latino we infer that the subject through these networks will achieve his goal of a viable existence 'free' from discrimination and brutality. Latin Queens narrative however is not solely about the "un-named individual" but is ultimately about "Wilhelmina". Wilhelmina is based in Toronto and is similarly seeking refugee status. The film documents

Wilhelmina's struggle as she narrates them herself while capturing the experiences of other latino/a queers who emigrated to Canada due to similar conditions. The "un-named individual" is juxtaposed with Wilhelmina and comes to represent a stark future should Wilhelmina be deported to Venezuela. In its 64 exposition of the criteria utilized by Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board,

Latin Queens augments the scope of queer politics in Canada and also speaks to a larger conversation of how nation-states confer national-belonging on its queer citizens .

One insightful moment occurs between human rights attorney El-Farouk

Khaki and a colleague in which Khaki summarizes the determining factors that are applied to recognize a claim. It must first be proved that the claimant is recognized as "a homosexual" in their native context, a dubious requirement at best, as one would assume self-identification to be sufficient enough. However, and what is most intriguing, is that the IRB must also determine the scale of intolerance to which the claimant is subjected. On the surface these criteria appear reasonable, yet the criteria inevitably require a cultural translation. A presumption of "reasonable" expectation of backlash form the benchmark of intolerable living conditions. Convincing claims must document and contextualize the extremities of a given individuals' situations in contradistinction to what the

Immigration and Refugee Board determines as "reasonable" degrees of intolerance. The images of the wounded body of the "un-named individual" serve a distinct function in this regard. Cabrera's decision to provide his audience with the prior knowledge from our entrance into the film's landscape is a provocation to reflect upon how Canada as a nation represents itself in contradistinction to other nations. In juxtaposing a brutal unliveable existence with that of a metropolitan and public one that enables the conditions for self-determination, 65 Canada comes to represent a veritable Utopia, thus confirming the image of

Canada as a bastion of human-rights on the world stage.

Wilhelmina's narrative contests this assertion, as her access to a more liveable existence is contingent on state apparatuses first confirming/conferring sexual minority status through a dual reading of nation(s). There is first an objective examination of the subject to ascertain that he/she is "authentically" queer, a process that inevitably calls upon one to perform their queer identity in a manner that is coherent to Canadian sensibilities. In the field of representation bodies marked as white, middle-class, gay and male, tend to serve as a referent upon which a divergent performance of a queer identity is made intelligible either in contrast or via an analogous method of interpretation.

In tandem with this assessment, validation of a claimant's subjective experience of the intolerance they endure must be provided. This often comes in the form of someone who shares the same country of origin who invariably stands-in as a native informant. In providing validation this "informant" is thus called upon to reproduce a narrative of their previous country of origin as

"socially backward" in contradistinction to a more "advanced" western culture of tolerance. Considering the culturally sensitive, if not politically charged nature of this task, one is hard pressed to find a consensus among a given ethnic community that the any particular is legitimate. Experiences of migration and settlement engender nostalgic longings for "home" that often inhibit one's desire to critically examine their prior national context. 66 Thus in Latin Queens, "homeplace" as mobilized by Johnson is experienced in a different geopolitical landscape, one which the necessary theorizing, and contesting of one's oppression is interstitial and contingent.

"Homeplace" for Wilhelmina is a tenuous place/space in which the contradictions of her life are about life and death. "Homeplace" for Wilhelmina is ultimately dependent on the assortment of social actors that form her new "community" be they queer or other fellow residents who share a particular ethno-cultural affiliation.

I return to the notion of "homeplace" as well as Johnson's vision of a

"Quare Studies" because it is narratives like Wilhelmina's that remind us that

"home" is a concept that is expanded when experiences of migration enter the fold.

Despite the overwhelming support of Hola: Grupo Latino, Wilhelmina is eventually deported. In as much as Johnson's vision of "Quare" Studies is attentive to enacting formative change in public policy, as it is presently conceived it cannot anticipate Wilhelmina's critical dilemma. In his momentary deferral to diaspora discourse through the work of Paul Gilroy, Johnson engages these insights at a textual level. Among the institutions Johnson envisions

"Quare Studies" will challenge (i.e. the Black church, Public Health regarding the disproportionate number black individuals diagnosed as HIV positive), U.S. immigration policy receives no mention at all. As a result the "wounded" subject that Quare Studies claims as its epistemological object ultimately must be a 67 naturalized citizen in order be considered.

That much of the advocacy on behalf of Wilhelmina was comprised of a network of gay men's organizations, with limited if any support from a governmentally funded settlement organization is quite telling. What this set of circumstances reveals is the limits of any theoretical project that does not account for the implications of state-apparatuses in shaping/conferring queer identities. I speculate that the lack of participation from a mainstream settlement organization indicates a certain disavowal not simply of homosexuality itself, but of the brutality faced by racialized queer subjects outside of Canada's borders.

Such a disavowal can only occur within a context wherein, state-sanctioned notions of "settlement" structure a rigid set of parameters within which said organizations comprehend the subjects they engage with.

To posit "homeplace" as a critical site of intervention, as Johnson does, is possible only if our field of vision engages the elsewhere of our cognitive capacities - the un- anticipated, disruptive, and the incomprehensible. A critical consideration of how the material conditions of one's country of origin , but also the figurative notions of one's "homeland", that are adopted upon migration is warranted. In tandem both factors are implicated in determining the validity of diasporic queer subjects interpretation and articulation of their conditions. The aforementioned issues require a nuanced set of critiques that inevitably require the participation of social actors outside of national boundaries. In this sense a diasporic intervention in any Queer Studies project is not merely theoretical. 68 Actual bodies are at stake.

Nonetheless, Johnson's vision of "Quare" theory and studies is a significant contribution. As a "theory of the flesh" it provokes an ethical demand of its practitioners, that can only enhance the scope of Queer Studies as an inter and multi-disciplinary endeavour.5 Johnson's vision of a "Quare Studies" when read as a manifesto is ultimately a call to return to the social body and its constitution (as racialized, gendered, sexualized, classed, and conferred with an expectation of ability) to compel a different ethical imperative among scholars invested in Queer Studies.

"Where" is the love?, ... is the question.

Read in tandem with Divas: Love me Forever, Latin Queens captures the complicated politics of diaspora, and community formation. Cabrera's multiple affiliations with the subjects and subject matter in his documentary films are instructive of how "communities of singularities" can assemble to un-work our present ruling regime. The men/women of Latin Queens differ in their racial and gender identities, sexual-practice, and their country of origin, yet nonetheless form "community" through an identification with a political imperative of social justice. It is not surprising that Cabrera would continue this interest in community formation among black diaspora queers to tease out the intersections of race, sexuality, gender-identity and national-formation.

5 ibid, p. 135 69 This case study closes with a meditation on Edimburgo Cabrera's documentary Divas: Love Me Forever (2002) to propose the idea of a Black

Queer Studies in/thru Canada. This assertion has the potential to reproduce a nation-centered discourse, however, rather than insisting on a hermetically sealed amalgam of three fields (Black, Queer, Canadian) to assert a national specificity, the in/thru signals the fluid movement of bodies, cultures, and texts, that in their transposition augment the conversation that Black Queer Studies engenders. As such, this critical position enables the exploration of the

"sexual/textual economy of unequal exchange" that elides Black Canada from the present concatenation of Black Queer Studies.6

In the tradition of Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied, and Jennie Livingston's

Paris is Burning (1990), Divas: Love Me Forever is an intimate engagement with some of Toronto's legendary black drag performers. Juxtaposing footage of their day-to-day lives with candid interviews, Divas articulates a counter-narrative of

Toronto's queer community and history that presumes that the foundation of queer politics in Toronto was solely based in a mutual recognition of a shared sexual minority status. Similar to Latin Queens, Divas enables, even provokes, one to engage the perceptual "outside" of what constitutes an imagined queer community in Toronto.

As we come to know the "divas", though some wouldn't refer to

6 Rinaldo Walcott, "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora," Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson. 70 themselves as such, the film serves as a homage to a segment of Toronto's queer community that is rarely recognized for their significant contributions to queer community formation. As Rinaldo Walcott observes; Divas poignantly illustrates how the labour of black drag performers has been "crucial to the development of what we might call a [queer] community" yet accounts of these contribution often fall outside of historical accounts.7

One need only defer to circuit diva Jackae Baker as she articulates her vexation at the conditional admittance of drag performers into the broader queer community wherein that in their labour is valued. In response to this tendency,

Baker reminds the audience of the central role drag performers have played not just in shaping the vibrant culture of Toronto's queer club-scene, but also in ensuring the survival of the community during moments of collective crisis.

Ms. Baker, Michelle Ross, and Chris Edwards have collectively helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for philanthropic initiatives over the years, through their performances of hope and inspiration. In particular these artist- performers embodied the necessary hope during a critical time in queer community formation, but were also the most staunch public advocates for

HIV/AIDS awareness.

While Divas is a belated recognition of these contributions, its most

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 97

7 Rinaldo Walcott, "Fragments of Toronto's Black Queer Community: From a Life Still Being Lived," Our Carribean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles ed. Thomas Glave (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) 360-361 71 profound offering is its alternate retelling of Toronto's queer history. Ms. Michelle

Ross is a key interlocutor in this regard. A veteran performer of over twenty-five years, Ross recalls her early days at The Manatee, a former gay nightclub in the mid-seventies. As Ross remembers a time when her audiences literally divided the room across racial lines, it becomes clear that not only are these divas the foundation of queer community formation, they are this community's griots.

While "official" historical narratives typically punctuate key political moments that would shape Toronto's gay and lesbian movement (the bathhouse raids in '81, HIV/AIDS crisis, marriage equality), Divas augments this story with the intimate and affective matters that ultimately make a community viable. The richness of this storytelling ultimately lies in the reversal of spectator/audience that "the divas" themselves enact. By unsettling the familiar relationship wherein

"the divas" are typically objects to be observed even adored, Cabrera reveals that his subjects have been "reading" their audiences all along.

Regardless of the events of that shape their world-view, the subjects in

Cabrera's film provides a critical "read" of queer politics in Toronto informed by the various journeys that have brought them to this time and place. Mati Dina,

Duchess, and Jackae Baker hailing from various parts of the Caribbean bring particular nuance to Divas story. Weaving recollections of "back-home" or their respective country of origin, each brings a different perspective to what black- queer experience might mean in light of their diasporic affinities.

Mati Dina, in comparing the experiences of being queer in Jamaica with 72 that of Toronto, vehemently challenges the recent trend in queer politics that has positioned Jamaica as one of the region's most notorious offenders of human rights within public discourse. While not dismissive of the harsh realities faced by

Jamaican queers, Mati recalls the "underground" scene that was radicalised and countercultural to heteronormative Jamaican society.

In distinction Jackae Baker shares the story of a dear friend in Guyana who was stoned to death because of his sexuality. In capturing this collection of varied diasporic perspectives Divas expands the notion of black queer diasporic community, and illustrates the complexities of such a formation.

What Divas signals is that rather than consider the formation of the Black

Queer Studies project via a "usable past" - as Dwight McBride has recently suggested - it would be fruitful to reframe the trajectory by considering a notion of

"usable routes". Though the two notions are not antithetical to each other, what a notion of "usable routes" gestures to is an attentiveness to the relationship of diasporic engagements with always evolving notions of "blackness" and

"queemess".

In as much as Divas is a celebration of these black queer lives, like

Cabrera's other films, it serves a political function beyond its queer audiences. In the winter of 2003 I was invited to speak at a screening of Divas at the Iced in

Black Film Festival. In the q & a session, the panel was asked whether or not we

"believed" that Caribbean societies were "that" homophobic? In our responses the panel deferred to the experiential knowledge of the film's subjects, and posed 73 that ultimately that was the importance of the film - to engage dialogue. What was provocative was the film's ability to usher in a teachable moment. In contesting a homogenized notion of community among Canada's black diaspora populations, Divas augments the focus of black political identifications by raising the issue of one's complicity in the oppression of sexual minorities. As a result any ail-too easy claim of innocence is undermined.

This political stance is didactic in that queer politics is similarly held accountable for its neo-colonial posture within current human rights initiatives in the Caribbean. A clear example of this is the current Stop Murder Music

Campaign championed by Egale, Canada's political advocacy group representing the interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered/transsexual individuals. Initially tailored to ban the importation of dancehall music with homophobic utterances, the campaign also seeks to highlight human rights offences against Igbt individuals in Jamaica and throughout the Caribbean.

Notwithstanding the very real violent context that Igbt persons in Jamaica must negotiate, Divas in juxtaposing differential perspectives on the realities of living queer in the Caribbean highlights the difficulty in reaching consensus as to what an ethical response would look like. That these conversations are staged in the diaspora is important, for as much as the political identifications of the Stop

Murder Music Campaign is directed outward, the dialogues that ensue are ultimately about how nation-states come to terms with the political demands by 74 their diaspora populations. For example notable dancehall artists such as Sizzla, and Bounty Killer, have been refused entry into Canada under provisions of Hate

Crimes legislation that restricts the entry of any person that would wilfully utter statements that would incite violence against persons recognized as a protected class - in this case the Igbt community. The common response is to equate these actions as tantamount to a violation of "free speech" supported by a political constituency that is imagined as white, gay, and male. Most of the public discourse regarding this controversy emerges in the blogosphere and many individuals comprehend the actions taken by the Canadian government as a state-sanctioned silencing of black and/or Caribbean cultural expression.8

In illustrating the varying ways that black diaspora queers navigate the contours of seemingly divergent communities, Divas: Love Me Forever serves as an important enunciation of Canada's critical positioning within the Black Queer

Studies project. In concert with emerging scholarship on black queers in Canada, such as Wesley Crichlow's path breaking study "Buller Men and Batty Bwoys:

Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Communities", Divas is an important source of embodied historical knowledge.

In suggesting that to engage the discourses of Black Queer Studies from a

Canadian standpoint one must frame it as a fluid exchange of ideas that pass in/thru I am signalling the malleability of borders. If one thing is apparent in this

8 see for example http://www.dancehall.mobi/2009/Q4/09/sizzla-refuses-to-bow-toronto-show- cancelled/ 75 study disciplinary configurations often rely too heavily on arbitrary notions of borders to establish their cognitive and theoretical landscape. In doing so the frame of a given project often elides the desires of their subjects of study, with very contradictory outcomes.

For example, in as much as Wesley Critchlow's ethnographic study of black gay men in Toronto and Halifax is path-breaking, I am concerned by its political investments in an uncritical version of an imagined black community. My concern lies with the manner in which the experience of oppression by Crichlow's subjects becomes reducible to the failure of black nationalism to embrace black queer politics. Against the grain of mainstream black community politics different assemblages of social actors engage in an anti-homphobic, anti-racist, feminist agenda that does not rely on a presumed sameness.

In framing his intervention as one that rests on an ethnocentric vision of community politics Crichlow's study elides the bevy of divergent political identifications that black queers invest in. Similar to my contention that E. Patrick

Johnson's move towards a "Quare" Studies limits the scope of the initiative by firmly situating it within a U.S. geopolitical context, so too does Crichlow's study in its call for a "buller theory" by conceptualizing its epistemological object as ethno-specifically of Caribbean descent. While both are linguistic moves that gesture towards a desire to name ones experience, rather than to adopt the language and discourse of parties who elide their experiential knowledge, both scholars enact a similar exclusionary politics. In calling for a "buller theory", 76 Crichlow presumes that ethnic identity is the overarching resource that black diaspora queers draw upon. In this configuration, the experiences of second and third-generation black Canadian queers is eclipsed, in a manner that undermines the intent of Crichlow's project.

What is accomplished in this examination of Edimburgo Cabrera's documentary filmmaking is that black diaspora queer identifications are messy, and that a theoretical enterprise that is foregrounded in ethnic identity politics will be hard pressed to account for this reality. To account for the realities of black diaspora queers one must have the willingness to engage multiple resources, as

Walcott's proposition of a black diaspora queers studies signals.

77 Conclusion - Towards a Black Queer Studies in/thru Canada

It is hoped, first, that Black Studies will serve the ideological function of creating a mythologized history and a system of assertive ideas that will facilitate the political mobilization of the black community. Such an ideological undertaking would necessitate the substitution of a glorified version of black history for the present debased one, but neither version seems unduly concerned with the discovery of historical truth.

- Bayard Rustin

In his essay "The Myth of Black Studies", Bayard Rustin presents a very critical portrait of the Black Studies project in the moment of its inception. Written in 1969 on the cusp of Black Studies inauguration into the U.S. academy his thoughts highlight the political tenor of the moment. Rustin's wariness stemmed from his concern that the initial conception of Black Studies presented itself as "a vehicle of political indoctrination" rather than a rigorous intellectual and theoretical endeavour.2 In a time and place forty years later, Black Studies is very much the rigorous interdisciplinary field he imagined, yet its many limitations were foreseen by Rustin.

Despite Rustin's insistence that there are parallel trajectories of the black and gay civil rights movements, in 2009 what we culturally imagine as a "black" and "queer" community at the local or national levels are more polarized than

Bayard Rustin, "The Myth of Black Studies (1969)," Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin ed. Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003)214-216.

2 ibid, 215 78 ever. 3 Indelibly, the emergence of Black Queer Studies is political in this regard as one desire I have is to find grammars that unsettle this arbitrary cultivation of

"communities" that continually imagine themselves as mutually exclusive.

Rustin's concern that a mythologized version of "black history" might be an encumbrance to the search for historical truth is equally poignant. It can be said that my engagements with Black Queer Studies are in part grappling with this tendency within Black Studies to elide the significant historical contribution of black queer thought. Rustin's own erasure from the "official" narratives of the

Black Studies project, also signals what is at stake in proposing a Black Queer

Studies. Rustin was an arresting presence for the Black Studies project from the outset, and his critical vision mirrors the interventions proposed by black queer scholars today.

In the previous case studies we explored the concept of autography as a critical artistic practice. In our close reading of Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, the critical inquiry of community formation and different forms of sociality were articulated in order to render visible the racializing, gendered, and sexualized logics that produce black queer subjects.

In the examination of Marlon Riggs oeuvre this practice revealed itself in

Riggs ability to re-signify his and other black male bodies to carve a space for the

3 Bayard Rustin, "The New "Niggers" Are Gays (1986)," Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin ed. Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003) 275-276. 79 enunciation of black gay men's realities. As a political intervention his films enabled a critique of the confluence of race, gender, sexuality and the heteronormative parameters of black community formation.

In their political savvy, these artists provided the foundations for the critical positions that are now articulated via the field of Black Queer Studies. Films like

Divas: Love Me Forever bring a different set of items to the agenda that will, like its predecessors, alter the scope and vision of the field. Further study of the impact that films like Divas have had in other contexts, as the film has been screened in other diasporic communities, will illuminate the manner in which

Black Canadian enunciations of queer politics transform a broader conceptualization of black queer community formation.

Recalling the epigram that served as the point of departure for this study, crossing over the landscape of these critical exchanges among artists- intellectuals and black scholars renders a different portrait of the originary moments of black queer thought. This study draws our attention to the dialogical manner in which black queer thought surfaces, for it is often in contest with dominant paradigms. To understand the genealogy of Black Queer Studies, one must look to the various artistic, and cultural moments that serve as profound provocations for its inception. In many ways prior to academic innovation, it was these artists who were bold enough to think otherwise.

Whether or not they were contesting the ideological or political function of

80 the Black studies project, filmmakers like Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien traversed the realms of art and academia to interrupt its agendas and to propose new forms of enunciation. Their interventions complicated the epistemological object of Black Studies and Queer Studies respectively, by un-writing the purported essences of the "black subject" that stands in relation to these fields and its practitioners. This lasting impression marks the political force of an autographical practice, as well as the productive utility of autography for future scholarship.

The impetus for this study stemmed from my engagement with the works of Riggs, and Julien during my undergraduate years in a Canadian university context. While drawn to their profound interventions, there was a lingering curiosity about the fact that their work translated so seamlessly in an outer national frame. Riggs critical work on racial identity and oppression though speaking to an African-American context, was somehow malleable and provided a grammar for students to speak to their specific realities. In many ways this engagement was instructive of the complicated ways black queers in the diaspora come to form their outer national identifications and networks.

The meditations on the filmmaking of Edimburgo Cabrera, that constitute the third case-study were provoked in part by my own scholarly desire to engage in this conversation named as "Black Queer Studies". When I recognized that my engagement with the fields of Black Studies and Queer Studies ultimately

81 emerges from the "outside" of their established epistemological contours, I engaged with Cabrera's oeuvre works to cultivate a differential cognitive space.

Cabrera's ability to narrate the bevy of critical positions that map the movements of bodies, and their complicated political insights is inspiring. At a minimum

Cabrera unsettles the tendency toward a nationalistic conception of what constitutes the ethno-political in Western-Nation states, and serves as a foundation for what I term the in/thru of Black Queer Studies in Canada.

Whether we consider Isaac Julien's ambivalence in situating his filmmaking as part of this larger intervention called "Black Queer Studies, or

Riggs' implicit call to do so, when considered comparatively, both positions highlight the urgent necessity for a veritable overhaul of how social subjects are constituted in academic discourse and subsequently studied.

As the previous case studies signal, prior diasporic exchanges enabled the voices of black gay men to be articulated on a global stage. The historical fact that Essex Hemphill's poetic articulations of homoeroticism was required to stand as a re-placement of Hughes' literary contributions to discuss black homoeroticism in Julien's meditation on author Langston Hughes, indicates the limits of current black communitarian discourses. The tacit inability to imagine forms of relations that are not dependent on national affinity prompts this call for exploring a notion of Black Queer Studies in/thru Canada.

82 In mapping this terrain by highlighting the in/thru of black queer discourses what is indicated is the flux of ideas that permeate imposed national boundaries.

What is hoped in putting forth this study is that future black queer thought by or about the realities of black diaspora queers in Canada, will abandon nationalist leanings to explore the diasporic circuits of black queer imaginaries. In short, it is a call to "think otherwise".

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Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality In The Movies. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987.

Rustin, Bayard. "The Myth of Black Studies" (1969). Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. Ed. Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom. Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer". Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Walcott, Rinaldo. "Isaac Julien's Children: Black Queer Cinema after Looking For Langston" FUSE Magazine 24, no 2 (2001)

Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who?: Writing - Black - Canada. Second edition. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003.

Walcott, Rinaldo. "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora." Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Ed E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 90-105.

87 Walcott, Rinaldo. "Fragments of Toronto's Black Queer Community: From a Life Still Being Lived." Our Carribean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. Ed. Thomas Glave. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 360-367.

88 Filmography

Cabrera, Edimburgo. Divas Love Me Forever. Anton Wagner Productions. 2002 — Latin Queens. Anton Wagner Productions. 2001 Frillot, Shari. Black Nations, Queer Nations?. 1996. Lee, Spike. Do the Right Thing. 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks. 1989. Julien, Isaac. Young Soul Rebels. Miramax. 1991 Riggs, Marlon. Ethnic Notions. California Newsreei. 1986. — Color Adjustment. California Newsreei. 1992. — Tongues Untied. California Newsreei. 1991. — Black Is, ... Black Ain't. California Newsreei. 1994.

89