Dreaming the Present

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 U.S. 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 overarching need was to free their movement from the logic of progress. From a remarkably diverse archive, Hunt extrapolates three shapes of non-progressive movement time: a continual beginning, a deliberate falling apart, and a simultaneity, a kind of all-at-once-ness. These temporalities center the present. And they describe 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 of futures, a moving meditation on the possibilities of the present.