When Queerness Is Tinged with Nostalgia: Whitewashing Homonormativity in Low Countries Nationalism and Re-Imagining the Queer-of-Colour past in North American Television and Fiction

In White Innocence (2016), Gloria Wekker’s concept of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ (108) reflects the ways in which, in the Global North, dominant discourses and representations of nonnormative genders and sexualities are monolithically understood through white homonormativity. Such whitewashings create a binary dichotomy that associates queerness with whiteness, while Arab, black and brown people are represented as essentially homophobic and transphobic. The imagery of imperialist nostalgia, with its antipodean categorizations, consolidates the supposed white/queer/innocent triad, reinforces racism and xenophobia, but also denies the existence of past and present non-white queer realities. This article examines an alternative and multidimensional understanding of queerness, one that explicitly challenges ‘white gay innocence’ and draws on ‘critical nostalgia’–described by Wekker as a type of nostalgia ‘with nonnormative sexualities as a basis upon which a politics of solidarity can take off, and for which hard work will be required’. More specifically, this analysis focuses on the first and second seasons of the television series Pose (2018, 2019), as well as on the novel Brother (2018) by David Chariandy. It will show how these two fictional works reinscribe black and brown queer subjectivities onto historicity and reshape a past that longs for a more critical future.