The Politics of Black Joy

Front matter

The Politics of Black Joy

The Politics of Black Joy

Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism

Scene 4 “Slay Trick, or You Get Eliminated” Chapter 4 “Winning [Our] War from Within”: Moving beyond Resistance

Conclusion The Politics of Joy in the Time of the Coronavirus

Notes Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are so many people to thank. Thanks to the time and energy and love that many of the faculty at Calvin College showed this highly inquisitive student during their years as an undergraduate student. Thanks to the faculty at Pennsylvania State University who managed to make a philosopher out of me, despite the odds. And thanks to the faculty at Wellesley College for their generosity of time and spirit in helping me to get the mentoring and intellectual stimulation I needed—and a special thanks to Mary Kate McGowan for arranging our monthly feminist studies meetings with yummy treats! Many thanks to the students and faculty of the University of Memphis, who have provided a wonderful environment for me to continue my work on Black southern life. Thanks especially to my student, Jasper St. Bernard, for his help in editing the first draft of this manuscript.

Thanks to the many Black women in the professional discipline of philosophy who went before me and mentored me, both near and far: Kathryn Sophia Belle, Kristie Dotson, Denise James, Anita Allen, Kris Sealey, Devonya Havis, Jacqueline Scott, and Denise Melton. Also, many thanks to my Black feminist colleagues who have encouraged, pushed, and sustained me on this journey: Axelle Karera, Jameliah Shorter-Bourhanou, Tempest Henning, Imani Perry, Cynthia Greenlee, Kameelah Martin, Kinitra D. Brooks, Birgitta Johnson, Alexandria Smith, and Regina Bradley. And thanks very much to the group that participated in the feminist research seminar on Beyoncé at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender for lively and fruitful conversations about Lemonade.

None of this would have been possible without the steadfast support of my family, friends, and wonderful husband, Danny J. Smith. Thanks to you all for your patience, energy, time, and love.

Introduction < The Trouble of Black Southern Joy

Finally, in this long trek through three hundred years of Black life, there was joy, which is what I mostly remember. The part of our lives that was spent neither on our knees nor hanging from trees.

—Toni Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History”

The red beans were in a salad. As I stared at the cold, dry beans in a diffident salad bar at a typical college cafeteria up North, I could not fathom why they had not been slowly simmered in their own sauce, as I was accustomed. Back in Louisiana. Truth be told, it was not until that moment that I truly understood that the South was not the whole world. And as I moved through various halls and classrooms, coffee shops and dinner parties, I learned, soon enough, that “the South” was instead a world of paradoxical meanings for those I encountered. Although many northerners, Black and white, heartily agreed that there was surely good food and good times to be had “down South,” it was also simultaneously assumed that Black life down here is ultimately untenable.! These paradoxes were present when a white professor politely accused me of cheating on an essay, saying “I just had to meet you because you wrote this excellent essay and you come all the way from Louisiana.” The paradoxes were present in the exotic excitement of colleagues when they learned I was from Louisiana and in the disappointment that crowded their faces as soon as I gracefully declined to tell them horror stories of Hurricane Katrina. They were present when Black northern friends would tell me all about their grandmama’s pound cakes that filled their dreams and the Mississippi police cars that fueled their nightmares. In many of these interactions, I found myself relying upon ways of evasion that I had learned growing up: feigning bewilderment, downplaying pain, or pretending not to know much about the things they asked after. I didn’t know why I didn’t want to give them these stories. It’s not as if I didn’t have these stories to tell. What I did know was that I ought to reject the pity they slid toward me, even when it was hidden behind apparent praise. This pity attached to Black southern life made it difficult to assert the joy that Toni

Morrison mentions in the epigraph, the joy that had sustained my life, my mother’s, and her mother’s in the face of many toils and troubles we endured “down South.”

These paradoxical views of “the South” are deeply rooted in our national imaginary. In our schools, media, and national stories, Black life in the South is sometimes pitched as so devastating that no one would ever seriously entertain the thought of living here. At the same time, Black life in the South is also rendered in nostalgic terms, as the “good old days” or a place to have a “real good time.” On the one hand, the South is presented as the site of Black tragedy, bearing the brunt of the nation’s sin of racism. On the other hand, the South is often portrayed as a land of Black enchantment, as the hub and home of much-celebrated Black cultural products, such as our food, music, and dance traditions. However, the type of joy that Morrison speaks about cannot be captured by such schemas of devastation or nostalgia, tragedy or enchantment. Although the South burgeons through and through with racism, our oppression is not so totalizing that it chokes out every tender shoot of Black joy. And that Black joy cannot be reduced to the truncated versions served up to tourists in Popeye’s commercials, Bourbon Street parades, and voodoo dolls. I know this because of my own upbringing.

To be sure, my upbringing included some experiences that my northern friends assumed. I remember the jolt of being called a “nigger” by a small white boy in my youth. He’d launched the word at me without either of us knowing what it truly meant, but we knew sure enough that it was not a thing to be said. And once he had said it, he got the results he wanted. I ceased to play with the little white girl he had boldly deemed to be his “girlfriend.” I also remember the fear that gripped me when my mother took me to a barbecue shop that was, unofficially, whites only. Upon our entrance, I immediately sensed our unwelcome in the frowns that graced those in the restaurant. When we reached the front counter to order, we were asked if we were “sure [we] didn’t want to go around back to wait.” My mother was a study in stubbornness and refused to budge, even as I begged her to let us leave without staying for the food we had ordered. I was too young to understand why she stayed put, but I was old enough to be afraid for our welfare. I shook with fear in the backseat of our car the whole way home.

But the place where I grew up was also shaped in ways that extended beyond the tragic stereotypes my northern friends imagined. My childhood was largely spent crisscrossing the Mississippi River to spend time with my maternal grandfather in Darrow, Louisiana, and my maternal grandmother (or maman as we call them) in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Both are largely Black communities situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Both have rich, complicated histories that are not simply ones of Black death and devastation. Sporting the largest free Black population outside of New Orleans during slavery as well as the first Black mayor (in the nation) during Reconstruction, Donaldsonville especially has a legacy of Black political

The Trouble of Black Southern Joy a agency, cultivated in the heart of the “sugar parish,” that often gets eclipsed by our assumptions of Black devastation in the South.”

Moreover, my upbringing is sown with scenes of Black joy. The simply sinful spread of crawfish, corn, and potatoes under the oaks in my grandfather’s yard as my extended family ate and ate until the cicadas chimed in with our music late in the evening. Birthday horse rides at the stable of my great-uncle, the (self-proclaimed) first Black cowboy in Ascension Parish. The glee my maman exhibited when she searched newspapers for dear, dead friends, eager to participate in the veneration of the dead through celebratory “homegoing” rituals. The seriousness with which my maman delivered a bit of wisdom when I was frightened by her beloved horror films: “it’s not the dead you have to fear, but the living.” The hushed tones with which my mother informed me that my maman had only seen a “hoodoo woman” once and how that woman “sure did fix” a loved one. Above all, I had a fierce sense that what I witnessed and participated in could not be reduced to merely a reaction against the racism that brands this region in our national imagination. In fact, I was acutely aware of how much of our everyday lives seemed to not revolve around white folks.

While some might not deny that such experiences of Black joy in the South exist, many remain wary of the political uses of Black southern joy in our national, public sphere. Black southern joy, for instance, was once used to justify our enslavement. Slave masters pointed to singing slaves as if a sliver of joy meant that we were content with our oppression. Used in this way, Black joy was reduced to enchantment, stripped of its critical power, and fashioned as the romance of Black life in the South. Though it is less often used to bolster an argument for slavery these days, Black joy in the South is still sometimes used against us. This can be seen in how a narrative of Black southern enchantment is frequently spun to evade the civil rights movement’s demands for political inclusion and recognition in our institutions across the nation.

Consider the tourism narratives (or curated national stories) of post-civil rights New Orleans. As Lynnell Thomas notes, the inclusion of Black culture in current New Orleans tourist narratives is largely due to pressure from the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement in south Louisiana, local African Americans lobbied for more inclusion in public stories about the region. The irony, however, is that Black southern “culture” came to be widely celebrated in the post-civil rights public sphere, even as Black communities continued to struggle with forms of institutional racism.’ As such, these tourist narratives began to overrepresent Black southern culture in the national public sphere while also “displac[ing] and distort[ing] the political and moral project of the civil rights movement.” That is, the tourist industry (and, I would say, the national public sphere more broadly) answered the political demand for inclusion merely symbolically, not institutionally. The tourist industry included rosy stories of Black southerners in the brochures and tours as if Black faces in pamphlets would absolve the insidious legacy of slavery. To tell the story in this way makes it look as if the disparities in wealth and health that Black New Orleanians are still facing is due to their own accord, not the racist institutions that persist in the nation. For Thomas, this is how the tourist industry in New Orleans could market the “desire” for a nostalgic southern past of Black culture, while also denouncing the current Black population of New Orleans as a zone of “disaster.”* In other words, Black southern culture came to be heralded, even as Black southerners continue to be looked down upon nationally.

It’s a curious tension: the vast celebration of Black southern culture right alongside wide pronouncements of the political devastation of the Black people who continue to live here. This dialectic of Black enchantment and Black tragedy can be seen in both popular culture and the academy. In both arenas, Black southern culture is often teased apart from Black emancipatory politics, so that Black southerners are rendered artistically enchanting but (ultimately) politically tragic. For instance, a celebration of Black southern culture can be seen in the public fervor over Beyoncé Knowles’s visual album, Lemonade. Many have devoted much analysis to the rich, jubilant allusions to Black southern culture in this visual album. Many have also praised Beyoncé’s stances on Black politics in snippets of the album—such as her references to Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and Black Lives Matter. However, in popular culture, the connection between Beyoncé’s Black southern joy and her progressive politics is more ambiguous, even tenuous. Considering a political climate in which overrepresentations of southern Black culture are used to temper complaints of racial injustice, some question the motives behind Beyoncé’s engagement with southern Black culture. Some suggest that Beyoncé’s engagement with southern Black culture simply reflects her shrewdness as a capitalist; as such, her album is not the pro- Black or Black feminist anthem it is frequently taken to be.® Seen in this way, Beyoncé’s engagement with southern Black culture is mere commodification, rather than the wellspring from which her Black emancipatory politics issues.

While there is some value to this critique, it also reminds us that there is a deep reluctance to link southern Black culture with Black emancipatory politics in the public sphere. Perhaps this reticence can be seen more starkly in the shock that northern white liberals displayed at the recent election of Alabamian Democratic Senator Doug Jones, which was brought about largely by southern Black women’s votes.” As Cynthia Greenlee observes, “the surprise and awe of Americans over the Alabama outcome reinforces the ludicrous notion that Black Southerners have been out here twiddling our thumbs and waiting for the liberation bus to stop in Dixie.”® The shock reveals the assumption that we lack political agency. As such, Greenlee rightly criticizes those who assume “that Black Alabamians have been ground into passive dust by the potent and public racism for which their home state has long been known—and were going to be MIA at the polls.”?

We can also see this tension in the academic recovery of Zora Neale Hurston’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. Although initially erased from her place in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston has largely been recovered by Black feminists since Alice Walker’s 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. magazine. And in the 1980s and 1990s, Hurston’s work came to be widely celebrated. For example, her work on Black southern culture became integral to academic curriculums in high schools and colleges.'° As Hazel Carby notes in “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston,” this ecstatic celebration of Hurston and Black southern culture in the 1980s and 1990s occurred alongside the further entrenchment of institutional racism in our communities. In this fashion, Hurston was used in school curriculums to increase Black representation, even as racism stubbornly persisted in those very same institutions. Especially in the South, where some were working to present a “new” image of the region as one that had learned from and been strengthened by its history of violent racial strife.

Like Beyoncé’s reception in popular culture, the connection between Hurston’s southern Black joy and her progressive politics in academic scholarship is ambiguous, and much more tenuous. Although Hurston is widely celebrated for her contributions to southern Black culture, her racial politics have a more complicated legacy. So complicated that we often shirk going near it. There have been few book-length treatments of Hurston’s expository work devoted to tracing her development as a philosophical and political theorist of race.!! Her essays have especially been undertheorized. Perhaps this is because, in her essays, her commitment to southern Black joy caused her to take political positions that put her out of step with her contemporaries, such as her public denunciation of the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools."

Due to these (often vexing) polemical stances, Hurston’s theoretical contributions to racial politics have often been rendered murky, at best, or dismal, at worst.' For instance, in her 1978 essay “Sexual Politics and the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” Barbara Smith introduced an important distinction to facilitate the recovery of Hurston’s politics. Smith showed that Hurston’s fictional works exhibited a “sexual politics” that informed intra-racial rather than interracial politics.'4 This was an important point to make in the larger context of debates about Black liberation. For during this time, Hurston became a powerful symbol of the intra-racial gender politics that often got erased in appeals to a Black nationalist agenda or models of Black power.’ This method of recovery was also highly successful; we would not have so much of Hurston’s work available to us without it. And since Hurston’s recovery in the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a proliferation of works devoted to further developing the intra-racial, and especially feminist, politics in her literature and folklore material. However, this tactic of recovery included conceding to Hurston’s critics that some of her interracial political views were tragically mistaken, even if we were sympathetic to the logic behind those views.'°

There is some benefit in placing Hurston and Beyoncé side by side in this discussion. The two have striking similarities. With strong connections to the blueswoman tradition, both are invested in creating a southern Black aesthetic, especially one with ties to the Gulf Coast region.” And although Hurston and Beyoncé are separated by long decades of Black political movements, racial gains in the public sphere, and radical shifts in society due to legal desegregation, there remain strong similarities regarding both the conditions of Black life and their use of Black affect in the public sphere. For instance, both in Hurston’s time and Beyoncé’s own, violence against Black and brown peoples often still proceeds without legal repercussions. And while Jim Crow legally expired with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it has been resurrected through the mass incarceration of Black and brown peoples since the 1970s. The most salient similarity for us is how Hurston and Beyoncé both insist upon performing southern Black joy in the public sphere. Their magnum opuses, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Lemonade, have both faced criticism on this score, due to concerns over the dangers of publicly performing Black joy amid our oppression.'* While their critics may appreciate the role of Black joy in Black liberation, some remain reluctant to elevate southern Black joy to an emancipatory political tradition. Much like the erotic and deeply gendered, southern Black joy has come to be devalued in Black political discourses.

The Dialectic of Black Enchantment and Black Tragedy

The political devaluation of southern Black joy has its roots in an emancipatory Black political tradition that mandates an emphasis on our racial oppression in the public sphere. This political tradition is one that stretches back to the abolitionist movement, where the suffering of the enslaved was used to prove the moral reprehensibility of slavery. During the antebellumabolitionist period, we were right to be wary of how some fashioned southern Black joy into an argument for our enslavement. And we are right to remain wary of how this argument continues to be used: when the celebration of Black southern culture in the public sphere becomes a way to evade addressing structural oppression. However, there is an important insight that gets lost in all our wariness of southern Black joy. In our haste to rid the public sphere of southern Black joy, we miss the danger in confining our stories to racial sorrow. Put another way, we miss how the aesthetic exaltation of Black southern culture and the political depreciation of Black southern agency, the displays of Black enchantment and Black tragedy, are linked. Certainly, the overrepresentation of Black southern culture can be used to bolster racism. But so too can the reduction of Black life to the oppression we face, which constitutes a severe underrepresentation of our agency. While we have become savvy at noting how Black joy is used to uphold racial oppression by our opponents, we are less apt to diagnose how the racism of our liberal allies is fed by stories of our abjection as well.

Grappling with the political effects of southern Black joy, assessing when and how it might be useful in the public sphere, means revisiting the context in which the dialectic of Black southern enchantment and tragedy first emerged: the abolitionist’s staging of Black sorrow and the minstrel’s show of Black joy. As a dialectic, there is an underlying logic that holds the two positions together in tension. Namely, there is shared anxiety about how whites perceive the inner lives of Blacks. Moreover, both sides share a presumption that Black life is tragic without white intervention. On the part of the slave owners, Black life is seen to be tragic without the “civilizing” benefits or forced “guidance” of enslavement. On the part of the abolitionists, Black life is seen to be tragic without northern, white political intervention to secure our emancipation. It seems that in the end, both sides are deeply afraid that when you cut open the hearts of Black folk, you will not, as they assume, find white folks there. The abolitionist’s forecast of tragedy and the minstrel’s chicanery of joy continue to echo in our representations of southern Black life as well.” On the one hand, due to the persistence of abolitionist discourse, Black joy in representations of southern Black life is rendered politically and morally suspect as “nostalgia” or as an evasion of Black suffering. On the other hand, due to lingering vestiges of pro-slavery southern sentiments, Black southern culture is celebrated as an achievement of racial progress, masking the way that racism persists in the nation. However, to fully delve into Hurston’s contributions to racial politics and philosophy, we must be willing to wade into the uncomfortable waters of southern Black joy.

In The Politics of Black Joy, I develop Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a response to this dialectic of Black enchantment and Black tragedy. That is, I read Hurston’s performances of southern Black joy in the public sphere as her way navigating the dialectic representations of southern Black life in our national imaginary, as just noted. In Hurston’s treatment of southern Black joy, she lays bare the terms upon which the southern dialectic of Black tragedy and Black enchantment proceeds—centering how white folks define our lives. Her performance of joy in the public sphere refuses, rather than entertains, those terms. As a concept, the politics of joy also aims to capture the corrective that Hurston provides by bringing southern Black joy into the public sphere in this way. While both sides of the dialectic persist in our national imaginary, it is the North that won the Civil War. It was thus the northern abolitionist that got to dictate how “progressive” stories of southern Black life were told nationally. As such, Hurston’s performances of southern Black joy also reveal the lingering hold of abolitionist discourse in the public sphere. In other words, her performances of southern Black joy reveal the implicit requirement of demonstrations of Black abjection for political recognition in our national public sphere.

During our own time, the political significance of Hurston’s emphasis on southern Black joy is a refusal of the neo-abolitionist mandate that we emphasize sorrow in our representations of Black life. When it comes to representations of Black life, neo-abolitionism captures the impulses (or, more strongly, mandates) to emphasize sorrow and mute joy, to dial down our pleasure and turn up our pain, in pursuit of white, northern liberal allies. I use the term “neo-abolitionism” to hearken back to the abolitionist discourse that informed Black writing during the antebellum period and to shed light on the lingering abolitionist norms and rhetorical strategies in contemporary Black political discourse. The prefix “neo-” here registers that the originating condition for these strategies (slavery) has been significantly altered (upon the “emancipation” of the enslaved), while also marking the afterlife of these strategies in US public discourse.

I develop the term “neo-abolitionism” from Hurston’s criticisms of abolitionist discourse in her essays. We can see Hurston taking up some of these themes in her 1938 essay “Art and Such,” part of her contribution to the Florida Federal Writers’ Project.” The Writers Project’s vision for the essay was a history of the artistic contributions of African Americans in Florida. Perhaps out of immense frustration, Hurston instead chose to write an essay that criticized a contemporary racial politics that restricted Black art to portrayals of Black suffering. “Art and Such,” along with Hurston’s other writings for the Florida Federal Writers’ Project, was ultimately dropped from the manuscript and left unpublished for decades. The recovery of this essay has lent much-longed-for insight into Hurston’s views on art for scholars.”' As Cheryl Wall remarks, the essay provides “rare and useful insights into Hurston’s understanding of African American literary and artistic traditions and of herself as an artist.”’? Seen in this light, “Art and Such” also presents something of a puzzle to Hurston scholars. Who exactly is her target in this essay? Some scholars argue that Hurston is critiquing her fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, such as Alain Locke and Richard Wright, in the essay.” However, as Wall notes, “she does not mention the Harlem Renaissance here or anywhere in her writings. Given its subject, the omission in this essay seems especially curious.””* While I agree that Locke and Wright are in the background of “Art and Such,” Hurston explicitly names the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, which suggests that abolitionists are the main target of her criticism. Indeed, in this essay, Hurston attributes the mandate to center oppression in our stories of Black life to the tradition of abolitionism. As such, I aim to move scholarly discussions of Hurston’s racial politics away from the Harlem Renaissance and toward the influence of abolitionism (through her refusal of it) within her writing.”

Although my development of the politics of joy and my critique of neo-abolitionism take place within the context of Hurston’s racial politics, these concepts touch upon broader topics and trends in race and gender studies. For instance, many feminist and race scholars have argued that a narrow focus on resistance has caused us to miss other modes of agency that the oppressed exhibit.” When we reduce agency to resistance, we act as if our reaction to oppression is the only thing that defines us. By reconceiving Hurston’s views on race through the politics of joy, I also aim to critique the dominant trend of reducing agency under oppression to resistance. I do this not only by emphasizing the dangers of limiting our emancipatory imaginary to resistance, but also by offering other modes of agency for analysis and study, such as joy. While resistance foregrounds an oppositional relation between oppressed and oppressors, joy foregrounds a flourishing relation of the self to the self (or, in the case of Black joy, how Black folks relate to each other). In this way, my understanding of joy is like what Audre Lorde describes as the “erotic,” which functions as a critical source of self-definition. The erotic, which provides “the open and fearless underlining of [our] capacity for joy,” encourages us to “live from within outward” and “illuminate[s] our actions upon the world around us” so that “we are responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.””’ Seen in this way, the truly erotic for Lorde, along with the Black joy which I am advocating, can become much more than naive nostalgia or exotic enchantment. Rather, Black joy can become an internal barometer by which we assess the ways our social environment inhibits or enhances our flourishing.” Moreover, this view suggests that Black joy is often reduced to minstrelsy in popular culture, similar to how the erotic is shrunk to the pornographic, precisely because of its potential power.”?

The theorization of joy in The Politics of Black Joy also has strong resonances with scholars working to shift the discussion of agency under oppression from acts of resistances to practices of refusal. In cultural anthropology, Carole McGranahan has stressed that refusal is not simply “another word for resistance.”*! Rather, these are distinct modes of agency. In indigenous studies (Audra Simpson) and Black feminist scholarship (Saidiya Hartman), the politics of recognition is one way that refusal is distinguished from resistance.** While resistance can, as Angela Davis argues, enable us to switch positions in the game of recognition, refusal is a rejection of the game altogether.” And that rejection is both world-breaking and world-making, both negation and generation.” Similarly, the mode of agency signaled by the politics of joy cannot be captured by the category of resistance. Instead of directly protesting oppression, Hurston’s emphasis on Black joy was more like a refusal to entertain the white gaze. That is, she strove to maintain an emotional indifference toward whites, relegating them to the periphery of a Black world.” Rather than actively fight against whites, she refused to pay them attention. And her refusal, I argue, exposes the terms and limits of political recognition from whites when pursued as a remedy for social injustice. In other words, Hurston’s insistence upon Black joy places pressure on the public demand of Black abjection for political recognition. This allows her to raise the question that Hartman also raises in her critiques of abolitionist discourse: “for whom does one expose the [pained Black] body?”** As such, to embrace the politics of joy is also to participate in a “refusal to offer Black suffering as the raw material of white pedagogy and enjoyment.”*”

Although negative, refusal is also deeply generative because it prompts us to, as Hartman says, “produce a thought of the outside while in the inside.” ** I argue that this is an important issue with which to grapple, given the resurgent popularity of the formulation of Blackness as “social death.”*? Such formulations force us to ask, as Christina Sharpe does in In the Wake, “what exceeds the hold?”*° My primary example of what may indeed exceed the hold is root work, those practices of conjure that Hurston analyzed as an anthropologist.*! Root work is a touchstone of West African religious practices that persisted even as slavery sought to erase our cultural ties to the continent.“ Root work has also been a source of innovation in the New World through its blending with Native American and European folk traditions. For Hurston, root work is an important site for working out the politics of joy. These practices are often, in her essays, one space where Hurston can decenter whiteness or refuse the white gaze in her analyses of Black southern life. In this way, she draws upon the rich reserve of refusals that root work stores in African American culture: refusals of respectability politics, of religious patriarchy, of the state, of cultural assimilation, and even of the Black tragedy that neo-abolitionism assumes.**