To move, to mourn, to exist: anti-Black ontology and the architecture of the memorial

Abstract

This thesis reads three Black memorial sites: the African Burial Ground National Monument, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and George Floyd Square as architectural articulations of remembrance of Black life in response to anti-Black ontology. Each site recognizes and responds to a discrete (re)instantiation of Black death: slavery, lynching and police killings respectively. Through these sites, I ask not how memory heals, but how architecture performs the ongoing labor of mourning death that is never past.