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Paper short abstract

Black grief across Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States reveals how mourning contests necropolitical power. By comparing revolutionary ritual, archival silencing, and erasure, this paper shows how African-descended communities turn loss into political resistance.

Paper long abstract

Across the Black Atlantic, mourning has never been limited to private sorrow. Instead, grief operates as a political language through which African-descended communities contest racialized necropolitics and state power. This paper introduces the concept of “grief regimes” - state-mediated systems that shape how mourning, memory, and loss are publicly acknowledged, regulated, or erased. Through comparative analysis of Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States, I show how different formations of grief reveal distinct exercises of necropolitical authority and strategies of resistance. In Haiti, revolutionary funerals and Vodou rites make death visible as a claim to collective liberation. In Cuba, Afro-Cuban mourning is suppressed and rendered illegible by colonial and national archives. In Mexico, the racial logic of mestizaje absorbs Afro-descendant death into the national narrative, erasing Black grief. In the U.S., Black funeral homes became social infrastructures of resistance, and the transnational mourning of George Floyd demonstrates how Black grief today functions as an uncompromising site of political contestation. By positioning mourning as both a product of state power and a tactic of resistance, this paper aligns with broader inquiries into how everyday experiences of death illuminate the workings and limits of necropolitical governance.