The Weight of Nightmares: Time and the Politics of Reparations for Slavery

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

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.