Tangled legacies -: The autos of biography (Isaac!Julien, 'Looking for Langston', 'Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask')

Drawing on two documentary films by Isaac Julien, Looking for Langston (1988) and Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), this paper advances a reformulation of the problematic of the biographical. I follow Derrida in interrogating standard notions of an exemplary historical agent's name and legacy, and claim that the biography already incorporates an autobiographical impulse. This tendency is evident in Julien's films, as he reads his protagonists' lives and works against the grain, and deploys biographical material to uncover--even invent--a black gay identity. Through his film-making practice, Julien articulates a voice for himself and his kind: this intersubjectivity mirrors his understanding of a great person's legacy as inherently a social phenomenon, open to future elaboration and recuperation.