The Weight of Nightmares

What if ending racial injustice means transforming not just wealth, but time itself?

Mieroop-Al Bahrani explores how capitalism, racism, debt and inheritance operate through a politics of time, where history isn't behind us but actively shapes the now.The demand for reparations has reignited fierce debate by exposing how today's inequalities rest on historical exploitation. This book argues that reparations aren't just about the past, they're about transforming the present by confronting the structures we've inherited.What would it mean to undo capitalism's logic of time and 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

IndexKenan Van De Mieroop-Al Bahrani is an author based in Brussels. He is Assistant Professor of History at Leiden University in the Netherlands and co-founder of the International Network for Theory of History.