The Weight of Nightmares

In this provocative and thoughtful new book, Kenan van de Mieroop-Al Bahrani explores how capitalism, racism, debt, and inheritance operate through a politics of time, where history is never simply the past but actively shapes the present.

Demands that reparations be paid for slavery and European colonialism have echoed around the world, igniting a fierce debate and exposing the historical foundations of today’s inequalities. The Weight of Nightmares argues that reparations are not just about the past. They promise to transform the present by confronting structures that reproduce relations of production and racial domination from one generation to the next.

What would it mean to undo capitalism’s logic of time to imagine a radically different future? A politics of reparation would reconfigure time itself, opening new narratives and collective possibilities.

1 Temporal power
I.A politics of time
II.From a politics to a poetics of time
III.Reparations talk: a debate across boarders
IV.A longer view of the history of reparations

2 The historical present as an ideological category
I.The historical present
II.An ideological category
III.The hermeneutics of racism

3 Inheriting debt, sin and the curse of Ham
I.Intergenerational justice
II."Ancestral fault"
III.The Curse of Ham, Original Sin and its critics
IV.Debt and Money
V.National responsibility
VI.The persistence of sin

4 Value in time and time as value
I.The time value of money
II.The price of reparations, the profitability of slavery and the Williams thesis
III.The consummate automatic fetish: fictitious capital, derivatives and time
IV.Accounting for value: slavery, money, value and time in Marx
V.Dead labour and the layers of historical development
VI.The homogenization of historical time: money’s functions as an instrument of temporality

5 Badges and incidents of slavery
I.Retrospective politics?
II.The Structure of racism
III.Epidermialization: Stuart Hall and the semiotics of "race"
IV.Transforming Traditions: dismantling ethnoracial domination

6 A new temporality?
I.The reproduction of the relations of production and ethnoracial domination

Index