Forget-Me-Not, Though the Nation Will: Black Queer Mourning, Homonationalism, and the Politics of Memory

This article examines how black queer communities navigate grief and negotiate the persistent erasure of their dead in public memory. It explores how the lives of black queer people are retold or redacted within memorial practices, questioning the extent to which queer kinship is acknowledged in these acts of remembrance. Attending to the material and affective traces left behind, this article considers how black queer mourning resists both social and state-sanctioned erasure. This paper explores how black queer communities care for and memorialize their dead. It also gestures toward a kind of queer ecological practice of grief, drawing on the symbolic and material presence of flowers in mourning rituals as both tribute and evidence of relation. In a landscape where homonationalist frameworks dictate who is grievable and how, this article insists that black queer death is not only an occasion for mourning but also a practice of world-making.