Lindsey Stewart, "The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
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What is the main focus of Lindsey Stewart’s book *The Politics of Black Joy*?
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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 Figdoor, Robert Talise, and Malcolm Keating. 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 Lindsay Stewart, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Her book, The Politics of Black Joy, Zora Neil Hurston, and Neo Abolitionism is just out from Northwestern University Press. What can Southern Black Joy teach us about agency?
What role does refusal have in liberation? What more might there be to root work than resistance? In The Politics of Black Choy, Stewart explores Hurston's contributions to political theory and philosophy of race to develop a politics of joy that owes much to indifference, refusal, and tactical misrecognition. Contending with white supremacy and countering neo abolitionist approaches that reduce Southern black life to tales of tragedy. Stewart suggests how politics of black choy can broaden our imaginations to think emancipation anew. Lindsay Stewart, welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you here today. So um will you start out by telling us a little bit about yourself and about your background as a theorist and how you came to write um this book on Zori uh Zoraniel Hurston's work and and
The rule of joy.
Okay. Um I guess one way to start would be that I'm from Louisiana, um Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Uh I think that if anyone Ask me um today, you know, where are you from? I'll still say Louisiana, even though now I live in Memphis and I've lived in a couple of places in United States um since being raised in Louisiana. And one of the things that always kind of struck out to me, uh, being from Louisiana, is when I went to school up north. Um a І Мишиґан і Пенсльванія. I noticed there is this mismatch or Um, between how people talked about black life in the South and how I actually lived it being from the South. And there was a sort of Disdain um and wearinet wariness about Mi wanting to move back.
To the south there was this sense that Um, why would I want to do that? It's so horrible down there. There's so much racism. The the Ku Klux Klan is always out. And That was their But There didn't seem to be room in those conversations for. Um A lot of the resources that I found. growing up in the South, um, in black communities. And it was almost as if it was looked down upon to say any anything really good about black life in the South.
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