NORMATIVE WAYS OF KNOWING assume that race is a marker and a way of being in the world made prior to politics and culture. Centred on the human as habeas corpus (you should have the body) these genealogical ways of knowing focus on the nexus of degeneration, purity and administration of the human and social body. ‘The look’, the category and the gene imply geopolitical and biopolitical boundaries. They are used to freeze and to fortify. Straight lines are their logic.

Coming to know otherwise posits that where race lives, politics ends (Gilroy 2000: 41). In the words of Alexander Weheliye (2014), this way of seeing is centred on the human as habeas viscus (you should have the flesh). It focuses on the ways that meanings of race are cultivated and grow inside of culture and politics – a process called racialisation. Coming to know otherwise has its eye, ear and voice on the nexus of this process: differentiation, inequality and the human (Weheliye 2014). It avers that meanings of race grow along bends and detours. They lean against other meanings as they grow into as yet unknown meanings, as yet unknown words. Aimance is infused with emergence in motion through, along and athwart boundaries, and with beginnings. It loosens, thaws and moves ways of seeing and becoming.

In this book the ‘not yet’ is grounded in four arts of coming to know otherwise: adversarial manoeuvres, creolisation, sociogenesis and aimance. These help us to ‘rethink the subtle yet persuasive attachments we may have to the architecture of race’ (Morrison 1997: 8). These ways of coming to know engage conditions of possibility for challenging racialisation.

Lines demarcate the world and impose closure. Love adds to the world. It does not take from it (Bauman 2010: 9). Love invites beginning, and beginning again, in relation. ‘Not yet’ is a space in which to reconfigure the world. A space in which to reconfigure subjectivity, resistance, learning, living and doing. ‘Not yet’ is the future in the present. You and I need not wait. We can grow the future for our time.