Dreaming the Present - by Irvin J Hunt (Paperback)

About the Book

"In their darkest hours over the course of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, and Fannie Lou Hamer gathered hundreds across the United States and beyond to build vast, now forgotten, networks of mutual aid: farms, shops, schools, banks, daycares, homes, health clinics, and burial grounds. They called these spaces "cooperatives," local challenges to global capital, where people pooled all they had to meet all their needs. By reading their activism as an artistic practice, Irvin J. Hunt argues that their overarching need was to free their movement from the logic of progress. Steeped in the wonders of this movement's material afterlife, Hunt extrapolates three non-progressive forms of movement time: a continual beginning, a deliberate falling apart, and a kind of all-at-once simultaneity. These temporalities describe how these leaders, along with their circles, maneuvered the law, reappropriated property, expressed the pleasures of resistance, challenged the value of longevity, built autonomous communities, and fundamentally reimagined what a movement can be"--

Book Synopsis

This is a story of art and movement building at the limits of imagination. In their darkest hours, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, and Fannie Lou Hamer gathered hundreds across the United States and beyond to build vast, but forgotten, networks of mutual aid: farms, shops, schools, banks, daycares, homes, health clinics, and burial grounds. They called these spaces "cooperatives," local challenges to global capital, where people pooled all they had to meet their needs. By reading their activism as an artistic practice, Irvin Hunt argues that their primary need was to free their movement from the logic of progress. From a remarkably diverse archive, Hunt extrapolates three new ways to describe the time of a movement: a continual beginning, a deliberate falling apart, and a simultaneity, a kind of all-at-once-ness. These temporalities reflect how a people maneuvered the law, reappropriated property, built autonomous communities, and fundamentally reimagined what a movement can be. Their movement was not the dream of a brighter day; it was the making of today out of the stuff of dreams. Hunt offers both an original account of Black mutual aid and, in a world of diminishing futures, a moving meditation on the possibilities of the present.

Review Quotes

"Dreaming the Present is a beautifully rendered and captivating enarration of Black political life. Hunt refuses a story of linear progress or permanent disaster for Black people, instead focusing on the hard work of doing, that is to say the Black political tradition in which ethical relation has been the primary ethos. He tells us about the work of the living, which is not held hostage to hope. The book is brilliant and timely and will transform our understandings of social movements from abolition to civil rights and Black Lives Matter."--Imani Perry, author of May We Forever Stand

"[Dreaming the Present] engages critically with a debate that remains pivotal in utopian and communal studies--what are the parameters by which to determine if utopian practices are 'successful'? . . . Hunt successfully brings together Black studies and critical theory on temporalities and on activism to highlight how these cooperatives cannot and should not be evaluated by longevity, membership numbers, turnover, amassed capital, etc., and that we, as scholars in utopian studies, need to consider how breaking with these logics of racist capitalism, as epitomized in Antiblackness, is a disruption of time that is possibly utopian in itself."--Utopian Studies

"A unique and thought-provoking perspective on Black cooperatives, time, and social movements. . . . Dreaming the Present [is a] well-researched [work] that significantly deepen[s] our understanding of 20th-century social movements. . . . [W]ill appeal to those fascinated by the temporal dynamics and aesthetics of Black cooperatives."--American Historical Review

"An engaging analysis. . . . Hunt calls forth a new way of looking at the Black cooperative movement and an alternative method for assessing its meaning and impact. . . . [I]ncisive and compelling."--Journal of Southern History

"For Irvin Hunt, the Black cooperative movement is essential to what C. L. R. James calls 'the history of Pan-African revolt.' Dreaming the Present is deeply attuned to that movement's ruptural gatherings and studious experiments. Hunt writes with a fierce urgency that requires and allows us to hear in and through the work of Du Bois, Schuyler, Baker, and Hamer the Black anticipation and extension of Samuel Beckett's blues: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'"--Fred Moten, author of consent not to be a single being

"Irvin J. Hunt reads key sites of Black cooperative economic formation to examine questions of political autonomy, collective power, and planning. He reveals how these cooperative formations were not just 'alternatives' to traditional market enterprises but were capable of protecting people from the violence and precarity of the 'free' market. This is a book that courses with creative energy, tacking back and forth between examples of the cooperative movements and their implications for social movement studies, literary studies, and political analysis. An enormously ambitious book."--Daniel Martinez HoSang, author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone