Many scholars have long charged Zora Neale Hurston of naiveté when of racism, romanticism of region, and valorization of the folk. While black feminists have rescued Hurston via her gender and sexual politics (black love is political), they have done so largely by divorcing her thoughts on race from this position. However, this dissertation revives Hurston's position on black liberation politics by introducing the concept called "the politics of joy," which recovers the interplay of race, gender, class, region, and religion in Hurston's critique of contemporary black leadership. Development of this concept is a contribution to black feminism, intersectionality studies, African American and Africana philosophy, and social political philosophy through its implications on concepts of race, gender, sexuality, class, and agency. To develop this concept, this dissertation will draw upon a range of historical figures (W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Richard Wright, John Dewey); a significant portion of the corpus of Hurston's work (letters, memoirs, essays, and folklore material); black feminist thinkers and contemporary philosophers (Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Cornel West, Angela Davis, Eddie Glaude, Saba Mahmood, Michel Foucault); and cultural work (past and current) done on hoodoo/Voodoo ( Kamelaah Martin, Katrina Hazzard-Buzzard, Jeffery Anderson). Through an analysis of Hurston's folklore material on religion, this dissertation will demonstrate how black liberation politics is often classed gendered, classed, and regionalized. With hoodoo/Voodoo material as a case study, this dissertation will show that concepts of agency need to be expanded beyond the register of resistance: for there are practices which cultivate resistance but cannot be read as simply resistance. Moreover, this dissertation will show that joy is political in two senses. Not only does representation of joy (i.e. folklore) in black life reveal intra-group tensions, but it also, in a deeper sense, addresses a dimension of black liberation that resistance cannot.