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Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance's Impolite Queers

I have long known that some queers can be astonishingly rude. I, however, did not, until recently, understand the way queer insolence has a peculiar significance for the literary articulation of characters whose interactions with race and sexuality are at odds with the dominant culture. Possibly, when one begins to investigate the overlapping representations of race and same-sex sexuality during the Harlem Renaissance, one might also be shocked, literally, to discover how vital the concept of rudeness is for the mid-1920s' literary presenta- tions of African-American queer sexuality. The story one learns certainly has a strong relevance not only for literary history, but also for contemporary African-American studies and queer theory that both, however unawares, inherit some crucial lessons and forms taught by Harlem's impolite literary figures. But, as we shall see, it makes sense that we should forget and excuse the indecorous, especially when they may show up unannounced. Specifically, in this paper, I want to plot the way in which acts of rudeness bring into sharp relief race criticism's sexuality amnesia, as well as sketch the formal possibilities for a black and queer literary aesthetic. For some years now, a number of powerful essays have voiced concerns about the critical divide between questions surrounding the cultural constructions of queer sexuality and race, and have consistently offered eloquent accounts about the archaic hetero- centricism thematically and structurally pervading much race theory and criticism. 1 Still, explorations about queer sexuality and African-American literary production suffer from an inability to queer, substantially, the cultural expressions of race, especially once race becomes the organizing rubric under which a culture articulates a literary tradition. It seems that intervening within the persistently rough opposition between "race" and "sexuality" is a central concern that underwrites much of Isaac Julien's Looking For Langston— a film where a black queer tradition is deliberately constructed and stylized through the literary retrieval and creative reconstruction of the queer sexuality of African-American authors like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Countee Cullen. 2 Almost uniquely, Julien's film refuses to let race dominate and eclipse the critical landscape that must also attend to same-sex sexuality; the always complicated and porous analyses between the different temporalities of the film present necessary reformulations of the nagging intellectual inquiries engaged in articulating the way people respond to, create, and reconstruct a life where issues of both race