Irvin J. Hunt on Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement

Sponsored by the Caxton Club

What if instead of waking up and demanding of ourselves more self-care, we demanded systemic change? Irvin Hunt discusses a movement that was based on collective care and a new system altogether, the black cooperative movement. In gripping detail, built from rarely before seen archival material, Hunt recounts how Ella Baker, George Schuyler, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Fannie Lou Hamer built vast, but forgotten, networks of mutual aid, from homes to health clinics. He helps us rethink who these giants were, what a social movement is, and how to care for each other in the here and now.

“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 South to America

“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 is assistant professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The program is open to all via Zoom.

March 16, 6:30 PM CT/7:30 PM ET

Zoom attendees will have an opportunity to participate in Q&A.

Registration for attendance via Zoom is required. Click on this link: https://caxtonclub.org/event-4715926/Registration