Dreaming the Present
Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement
By Irvin J. Hunt
280 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 22 halftones, 1 map
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6793-5
Published: April 2022 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6792-8
Published: April 2022 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6794-2
Published: February 2022
Buy this Book
- Paperback $29.95
- Hardcover $95.00
- E-Book $23.99
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Free E-Exam Copies
Awards & distinctions
Finalist, 2023 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize
Shortlisted, 2023 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award
About the Author
Irvin J. Hunt is assistant professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaāChampaign.
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Reviews
āAn 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.āāJournal of Southern History
āDreaming 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.āāImani Perry, author of May We Forever Stand
āFor Irvin Hunt, the Black cooperative movement is essential to what C. L. R. James calls āthe history of Pan-African revolt.ā Dreaming the Present is deeply attuned to that movementās 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 Beckettās blues: āTry again. Fail again. Fail better.āāāFred Moten, author of consent not to be a single being
āIrvin 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 āalternativesā to traditional market enterprises but were capable of protecting people from the violence and precarity of the āfreeā 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.āāDaniel Martinez HoSang, author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone
āBursting with new insights into time, creativity, and collectivity, Irvin J. Hunt has given us a fresh and exciting examination of African American intellectual and political traditionsāa brilliant, energizing book that will be relevant for years to come. Smart, engaging, and full of extraordinary observations and arguments. An immensely important work.āāJohn E. Drabinski, University of Maryland
Multimedia & Links
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