by Rajeev Balasubramanyam 

Two weeks ago I met an artist who hadn’t produced any work since Trump’s election in November. She was in shock, felt helpless and bereft. ‘I just want things to go back to normal,’ she said, ‘and then I can make art again.’ By ‘normal,’ I suspect she meant a return to the Obama years, before Brexit, before the resurgence of the far right in Europe. There must be thousands like her, liberals frozen in headlights, experiencing not so much a political shock as a reality shock.

Image by Gage Skidmore

I suspect this reality shock is far weaker for people of colour for whom, metaphorically speaking, Trump has always been there. He was there during the slave trade and during the years of colonial occupation; he was there whenever a western military bombed or invaded a third world country for its resources; he was there…