Publisher's Synopsis
On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The movement that grew out of the rebellion that followed inaugurated a new sequence in the struggle against racism in the United States. As with previous sequences in that struggle it quickly acquired an international dimension, including here in South Africa. One aspect of this international moment has been an urgent confrontation with the reality that what Cesaire called 'abstract equality' does not, on its own, mark an end to the racialization of life. In the United States, and elsewhere, there is a sense that history is as present as it is past. Just over a decade ago, Baucom observed that 'what-has-been is, cannot be undone, cannot cease to alter all the future-presents that flow out of it. Time does not pass or progress, it accumulates'. It is the sense that time accumulates into the present that has often led to the invocation of William Faulkner's famous line
