Elisabeth Paquette, "Universal Emancipation: Race Beyond Badiou" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
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What is the purpose of the episode and who are the hosts and sponsors?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the best education podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share. A map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at occulehyphenmundi.com while you listen.
Jerry's guests include Zakya Suewell, who's an English broadcaster, and writer on Finding Albion, Josh Schmidt, who's the Head of maps at the Zurich Central Library, Pat Seed, a US historian on Ptolemy's World Map, John Romero, who's a legendary video game producer on the Doom Game Creator, Elif Sharak, a well known Turkish British novelist, and Chet Van Duzer, a historian who will tell you about Martin Valdsey Mueller's Carter Marina of sixteen forty five. I highly encourage you to subscribe to What's Your Map. It's available on Apple, Spotify, and all major Podcast platforms. Welcome to the new books network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I'm co host of the channel along with Carrie Fichtor, Robert Talise, and Alexis McLeod. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Elizabeth Paquette, Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Her book, Universal Emancipation, Race Beyond Badoo, is just out from the University of Minnesota Press. What is Batu's theory of emancipation?
For whom is this emancipation possible? Does emancipation entail an indifference to difference? In universal emancipation, Paquette pursues these questions through a sustained conversation with decolonial theory, particularly the work of Sylvia Winter. Through consideration of negritude and the Haitian Revolution. Piquette argues for a theory of emancipation that need not subtract particularities, as Padu theorizes, but rather build a pluriconceptual framework, as Winter theorizes, for emancipation based on solidarity. Uh welcome Elizabeth to New Books in Philosophy. Hi Sarah. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for being here today. Would you start by telling us a bit about yourself, um, your background as a philosopher, and how you came to write this book based on your interests?
Yeah, absolutely. Um So um I mean I can start with my my training. I mean my my training is in um Ontario universities, uh I said a little a lot of continental philosophy. Uh I read a lot of Hegel, a lot of Heidegger uh and Beauvoir. Um but I've always had an interest in social political philosophy, um, which I started developing in graduate school. And so I'd read, you know, Marx and Hodgs and Locke, and then Aristotle's politics and Hegel's politics. Um, and then I started getting into Alfazer, um, Ballybar and Badieu. Um, and so there's always been this sort of um French social political theory, um uh path that I was on that ultimate led me to bad hue, which is the what the um the topic of the book that uh I wrote here.
Um but aside from that, I mean there's there are two other really big things that went into um writing this book. Um and the first one is that um in reading bad you There was a I was having a struggle with um some of the things that he was uh saying. And so in a certain sense, like I was drawn to it because I understood sort of where he was coming from and where he was trying to go, but there was always something that didn't quite sit right for me in thinking about um what he was trying to do in this in his his very large corpus.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the purpose of the episode and who are the hosts and sponsors?
0:00–7:30
2
How does Elisabeth Paquette describe her philosophical training and what led her to write *Universal Emancipation*?
7:30–14:18
3
What is Alain Badiou’s theory of emancipation and why does he demand an “indifference to difference”?
14:18–23:09
4
How does Paquette critique Badiou’s “indifference to difference” using the Haitian Revolution and the 1805/1801 constitutions?
23:09–30:34
5
Why does Paquette turn to Sylvia Wynter’s concept of liminality and a pluriconceptual framework for emancipation?
30:34–37:58
6
What is the distinction between additive and subtractive politics in Badiou’s thought, and how does Paquette illustrate it with same‑sex‑marriage?
37:58–45:43
7
How does Paquette connect decolonial theory, climate‑change impacts, and the need for solidarity beyond universalist politics?
45:43–54:25
8
What are Paquette’s future projects and how does she envision expanding the conversation on race, gender, and decolonial solidarity?
54:25–59:04
Speakers
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