Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement by Irvin J. Hunt, and: Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement by Irvin J. Hunt, and: Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White Jennifer Nardone (bio) Irvin J. Hunt Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022 288 pages, 21 black-and-white illustrations, 1 map ISBN: 9781469667942, $23.99 EB ISBN: 9781469667928, $95.00 HB ISBN: 9781469667935, $29.95 PB Monica M. White Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press xiii + 208 pages, 11 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9781469643700, $14.99 EB (2018) ISBN: 9781469663890, $19.95 PB (2021) Over the last two decades, researchers and scholars have begun the complicated process of untangling the colonial landscape. These efforts are not confined to the colonial landscape of seventeenth-century wood-frame houses in greater Boston or the eighteenth-century plantation fields along the James River, many of which have been preserved over centuries and are now open for public tours and events. Those sites, even when there is no remaining structure visible—a plantation, a church, a cemetery—are forged in the settler-colonial imagination. Much like vernacularism encouraged architectural historians to look beyond monumental structures, settler colonialism as a methodology demands accountability for the White supremacy embedded in both vernacular and monumental spaces. “The vernacular” certainly expands our understanding of how space and place are defined by diverse groups of people. Settler colonialism, however, rejects the presumption that everyone envisions a landscape as a defined—or even liminal—space. What if disorder and impermanence are the only meaningful acts of resistance against ubiquitous White supremacy? Are those legible spaces in the vernacular landscape? As Irvin J. Hunt asks in his new book, when talking about spaces, places, and race, can we “unravel Blackness from property?” (95). Two recent books—neither one written by historians, architectural or otherwise—grapple with what it means to interpret [End Page 148] architecture and landscapes intended to be indecipherable to anyone who is initially viewing or scrutinizing such sites. In his book Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, Irvin J. Hunt, an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, considers architecture as temporal rather than spatial. Hunt focuses on Black cooperatives and other efforts to build systems of mutual aid as anti-places rather than as ephemeral, vernacular spaces. To that end, Hunt focuses his study upon three cooperative efforts: the Negro Cooperative, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1918; the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League (YNCL), organized by George Schuyler and Ella Baker in the early years of the Great Depression; and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm, in operation from 1969–76. Cooperatives aim to disrupt capitalist economies, including the economics of place (i.e., who owns a cooperative?). Hunt argues that Du Bois, Baker, Hamer, and their allies viewed cooperatives as a moment in time rather than as the foundation for a permanent alternative to the capitalist economy. That, after all, would require codifying a different kind of (sustainable) economy—a variation on the historicized concept that certain institutions can be “of but not in” a dominant economic system. Black cooperative movements “had no interest in going anywhere, only taking place,” Hunt surmises. “They indeed had a destination: new locations in a present heretofore unseen” (5). Hence, Du Bois, Baker, and Hamer never intended to establish permanence, only to persist in the present. While vernacularism often includes a consideration of temporal and impermanent spaces, Hunt’s book encourages a different reading of space altogether. Scholars often see “subversive space” within a racialized landscape. African Americans may find safety and meaning in the ephemeral, where they are able to counter White surveillance and violence. Often such places look innocuous to White people: churches, family gatherings, parades, juke joints; these spaces come and go, they were never meant to be permanent.1 African Americans found ways to subvert segregation and White supremacy through impermanence and codification of conceptual space, rather than through architectural planning. Defining the Black vernacular landscape as a...