Inner Weather

In Lawrence's expertly subtle and fearlessly ambitious essay, he draws from two traditions of social movement analysis. The first is sociological and it identifies the "new ways of thinking about the world" that a movement engenders.1 Movements not only drive us "into the street" or recirculate philosophies of action. They produce new ones, new philosophies, new action, through a process named "collective action framing."2 The second tradition is philosophical and it analyzes something harder to see: the routes by which these new lines of thought "permeate society as a whole."3 It is a kind of ecological study of movement "'climates,'" of changes in the social "'weather.'"4 Movements not only give rise to "cultural organizations and institutions."5 They reorient how culture is thought and made.

My concern is that these traditions deemphasize the felt vulnerability of movement actors in their public interactions with power. Following Kevin Quashie's analysis of the quiet forms of protest during the Civil Rights Movement, so quiet and internal they throw into crisis the very meaning of protest, I am curious about what happens when we think of a movement as "a collectivity conversant... with vulnerability."6 When we center the individual risks and injuries of engaging in collective battle, what happens to the way we understand the temporality of a movement and its terms of resistance? A consideration of this question entails tilting our focus from the more public representations of movement formation (occurring "in the street," sweeping through a "whole" culture) toward its interior realities.

I want to probe the problem of what Lawrence calls the "representational dilemma" of how to "make a collective out of a group of singular subjects."7 He notes that wrestling with this dilemma of representing who constitutes the "we" in any call to mobilize is necessary to translating that call into mobilization. I am briefly posing some provocations to extend this line of inquiry.

One area we can go is to the genre absent from Lawrence's essay: poetry. Lawrence focuses predominantly on narrative. He asks, "how does one narrate the complex trajectory of the sixties movements, with their multiple alliances, contradictions, splits, and disputes?"8 But what do we see when we ask, how does one poeticize them? Poet and community organizer Erica Hunt poses a similar question in her essay "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics," which has shaped the approaches to craft for range of experimental contemporary poets, like Ronaldo Wilson and Dawn Lundy Martin. Writing in 1989 with inspiration from the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hunt asks us to rethink the literary negotiation of social movement politics. Hunt finds the end of the Cold War a generative moment to formulate "an expanded sense of poetics."9 She proposes a set of "plural strategies to remove the distance between writing and experience."10

Attendant to the multiple and contradictory roles Black women play by necessity in their activism, she interrogates the notion of "character as predictable and consistent" and of "theme as an elaboration of a controlling idea."11 By contrast, Hunt makes room for a character that "may be singular, plural, inexplicable, composite, evolving, non-human or found," and for a theme that "might consist of a surface, a tone, a didacticism; be latent or disjunct."12 It is the more conventional aesthetic practices that Lawrence excavates in his readings. Harnessing collective action frames poised to elucidate differences and divisions among broad, often totalizing worldviews, Lawrence reads Alice Walker's 1976 novel on the Civil Rights Movement, Meridian. He remarks that the "novel constructs its characterological schema around...competing visions of the Black freedom struggle," the socialism of the Black Panther Party, for example, contra the capitalism of the Nation of Islam.13

Oppositional poetics attunes us to the interior experience of traversing these philosophies, an experience that obscures their differences and the boundaries they assert between insurgents and state power. It attunes us to literary representations that do not rise to the pretense of a book but lie in underappreciated places: per Hunt, partial or "disjunct" stories, unspoken or "latent" stories, and among the predominant aesthetic practices of the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps freedom songs and oratory asides. My bigger point here is that one of the issues in collective action frames is that they struggle to account for the sheer extent of state violence, which emerges in the interruptions to traditional storytelling. My point is to account for the way state violence forces one's resistance into double binds, such that the very frameworks necessary to counter one's captivity—from personhood to protest itself—ultimately reinforces it.

In 1964 Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, standing in a church beside Malcom X, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."14 Hamer names a fatigue pushed to its outer limits, then portrays herself pushing impossibly beyond it, as though a self in excess of herself, "inexplicable" and "plural," in Hunt's words. Hamer's very effort to escape the conditions of exhaustion force her to retread them, to repeat herself, as we can see in her verbal repetition.

Hamer identifies an experience of enclosure that, according to a remarkable range of scholars from various philosophical traditions, has intensified among historical reflections on the Left since the fall of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Extending these reflections, Rizvana Bradley powerfully draws out the effect of trying to mobilize on what some have called "collateral afterworlds"15 or an accumulation of aftermaths: the racially gendered desire "for flight even from the reproduction of flight."16 We have all but forgotten the words that directly followed Hamer's most famous statement. "We've given them time," she said. "I've been tired for so long."17

What if a movement is what occurs at the limits of time, outside of all time given to the State, outside of any time given by it? How do we read the shape of a movement that is generated from being out of time and, in a terminal sense, out of time, of being "sick and tired of being sick and tired?" Its guiding metaphor might look more foggy than a frame. It might look as much like a climate as our inner weather.

---

Irvin J. Hunt is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of IllinoisIllinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books, Dilettante Army, Post45, and elsewhere. Hunt co-wrote the film BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2025 and was rated "Best of the Festival." Hunt is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (UNC Press, 2022), honorable mention for the William Scarborough Sanders Prize of the Modern Language Associations, shortlisted for the Stone Book Award, and finalist for the Best New Book in African American History and Culture from ASAALH. Dreaming the Present tells the story of how Black artists pioneered practices of mutual aid that fundamentally changed what a social movement can be. He is currently working on a book on Black women contemporary poets and their innovative language for modern grief.

---

References