Queer Ahistoricism from Melville to Our Flag Means Death

Abstract: When the protagonist of Herman Melville’s Omoo produces a mutinous petition upon blank pages torn from a work of eighteenth-century pirate history, he models how the incomplete archive of Golden Age piracy inspires present and future configurations of social and erotic relations. This episode anchors the novel’s critique of historicist reading practices, which, this essay argues, links Melville to the television series Our Flag Means Death (2022–2023) and its reimagining of the love story between two non-fictional pirates, Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet. Tracing a set of contiguous affiliations between the series and Melville’s fiction, the essay develops a theory and practice of queer ahistoricism: an interpretive framework that encourages non-normative forms of encounter between historical moments and participants through anachronisms, infinitive verb tenses, and non-chronological recursions. Of special importance is Our Flag Means Death ’s concept of “the art of fuckery,” which emphasizes the value of historical uncertainty to contemporary and future forms of queer creation and relation, and in doing so, throws new light on Melville’s related temporal critiques in Billy Budd and Moby-Dick .