The Promise of Happiness - Hardcover

Ahmed, Sara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822346664 ISBN 13: 9780822346661

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2010

Synopsis

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: "I just want you to be happy"; "I'm happy if you're happy." Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the "happiness duty," the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

About this title

Review:

"At a time when happiness studies are all the rage and feminism is accused of destroying women's happiness, Sara Ahmed offers a bold critique of the consensus that happiness is an unconditional good. Her new book asks searching questions about the nature of the good life, making its case in a wonderfully pellucid prose. What a paradox that a defense of the kill-joy should be such a pleasure to read! This timely, original, and intellectually expansive book is sure to trigger a great deal of debate."--Rita Felski, University of Virginia

"What could be more naturalized and less subject to ideological critique than happiness? How are we to get critical perspective on it? Through her readings of texts and films, Sara Ahmed shows how this might work. By revealing the complexity and ambivalence of happiness, she intervenes in several fields--including queer and feminist theory, affect studies, and critical race theory--in a genuinely new and exciting way."--Heather K. Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

"
The Promise of Happiness is richly valuable not only for its discussion of utilitarianism but also for its broader deconstruction of the workings of happiness in a range of works of philosophy, literature, and social science. Whereas other feminist theorists also occasionally cast a critical eye toward happiness, or raise consciousness of female unhappiness, Ahmed has produced a volume that is unparalleled in its sustained and extensive expose´ of the entanglements between discourses of happiness and oppression." - Andrea Veltman, Hypatia

"Fascinating and important, both in showing us how to read some key texts differently and in showing how to think more carefully about happiness and its politics. . . . [T]here is a perverse happiness to be taken from reading such an interesting book about the insufficiency of happiness."--Richard Ashcroft "Textual Practice "

"The Promise of Happiness is richly valuable not only for its discussion of utilitarianism but also for its broader deconstruction of the workings of happiness in a range of works of philosophy, literature, and social science. Whereas other feminist theorists also occasionally cast a critical eye toward happiness, or raise consciousness of female unhappiness, Ahmed has produced a volume that is unparalleled in its sustained and extensive expose´ of the entanglements between discourses of happiness and oppression."--Andrea Veltman "Hypatia "

"Ahmed's analyses are spot-on and provocative. . . . Ahmed's analysis of this and other topics is unpredictable and engaging." - Heather Seggel, The Gay & Lesbian Review

". . . [F]ascinating and important, both in showing us how to read some key
texts differently and in showing how to think more carefully about happiness
and its politics. . . . [T]here is a perverse happiness to be taken from reading
such an interesting book about the insufficiency of happiness." - Richard Ashcroft, Textual Practice

"The Promise of Happiness is an extraordinary text that should become a mainstay of affect studies and that serves as a strikingly powerful model of astute cultural critique. Ahmed offers an insightful study of our preoccupation with and desire for happiness."--Jenna Supp-Montgomerie "Women's Studies Quarterly "

"Expand[s] the political horizons of feeling and cultural politics with exciting complexity . . . brilliant."--Sarah Cefai "Cultural Studies Review "

"By unpacking the attribution of happiness to specific choices and lives, Ahmed encourages us to consider how 'the promise of happiness' serves as a moral imperative. A stimulating and--dare I say--pleasurable read, the book may not have a happy ending, but it does propose what might happen instead."--Kestryl Cael Lowrey "Lambda Literary Review "

About the Author:

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, also published by Duke University Press; The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality; and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0822346664
• ISBN 13: 9780822346661
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328