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 US 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.
