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 title" may belong to another edition of this title.