Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement

Americans have most often remembered the civil rights movement through reductively romantic narratives, in which heroic figures triumphed over racial injustice, ushering in decisive legal and political victories. This celebratory storytelling shapes how the civil rights movement is taught, commemorated, and mobilized in political thought.

Brandon M. Terry’s Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope offers a detailed and highly nuanced study of competing narratives of the civil rights movement. More importantly, it critically excavates the exemplary status that romantic narratives of the movement have acquired in American political thought over the last fifty years. In exposing the crisis of authority that has gripped these narratives—and that has shadowed the advent of Black Studies-informed political theory for now two, possibly three, generations of scholars—the book provides a rich philosophical framework for taking a “step back” from the narrative forms that inform our thinking, for critically assessing those forms, and for reorienting political thought to the distinctive demands of the current moment.

A daylong symposium on Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope will bring together author Brandon Terry and leading scholars to explore the book’s ideas in depth. The symposium will feature three panels, each focused on one of the book’s three parts. The day will conclude with a public conversation featuring Cornel West, Farah Griffin, Brandon Terry, and Robert Gooding-Williams on the book’s implications for contemporary political thought and action.

Please register in advance for the panels you plan to attend. No registration required for the public conversation: “Black Politics in Dark Times: After Civil Rights, After Obama, After Black Lives Matter” at 4:30 pm in Battell Chapel.

Copies of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope will be available in limited quantities to registrants who sign up before March 1. Distribution will be on a first-come, first-served basis, while supplies last. For more information, contact Megan O’Donnell (megan.odonnell@yale.edu) at the Whitney Humanities Center.

Symposium Schedule

All panels will be held in HQ 276; “Black Politics in Dark Times” will take place in Battell Chapel (400 College St.).

9:00–10:00  PART ONE: A CRITICAL THEORY OF EXEMPLARITY, JUDGMENT, AND NARRATIVE
Robert Gooding-Williams, Yale University, and Brandon Terry, Harvard University

10:15–12:15  PART TWO: ROMANCE
Moderator: Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University

Alexander Gourevitch, Brown University
Shatema Threadcraft, Vanderbilt University
Aziz Rana, Boston College Law School

12:15–1:30  LUNCH BREAK

1:30–3:30  PART THREE: AFTER ROMANCE
Moderator: Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University

Bryan Garsten, Yale University
Adom Getachew, University of Chicago
Juliet Hooker, Brown University

4:30–6:00  BLACK POLITICS IN DARK TIMES: AFTER CIVIL RIGHTS, AFTER OBAMA, AFTER BLACK LIVES MATTER
Moderator: Robert Gooding-Williams, Yale University

Brandon M. Terry, Harvard University
Farah Griffin, Columbia University
Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary