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The Promise of Happiness

Author: Sara Ahmed

Subjects Gender and Sexuality , Theory and Philosophy > Feminist Theory , Cultural Studies

“ The Promise of Happiness is a wonderfully written book we would recommend to anyone working at the intersections of philosophy, anti-racism, and critical race studies, as well as both gender and cultural studies, and, of course, those involved in the field of happiness studies and positive psychology. . . . [W]e have appreciated The Promise of Happiness in its ability to speak to us on a personal level. Thus, being moved, intrigued, and stimulated by this book, we can say that we are happy with it.” — Krizia Nardini and Matilda Lindgren, Nora

“ The Promise of Happiness features a series of creative hermeneutic adventures that Ahmed describes quite simply as a matter of 'reading’ certain visual and textual archives. Her own ‘readings’ of cultural objects and events, mediated as they are through her personal and political experience, throw into relief the productive capacities of such practices of meaning-creation that we all can and do engage in with the texts, tales, images, performances, and cases to which we give new expression in and through our engagement with them. While her interpretive dance between these texts is far more fast and loose than is the familiar academic custom, it provides an invigorating spectacle, all the while inviting its readers to reflect on the many archives we traverse in our affected lives and respective disciplines.” — Margaret Denike, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“ 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

“[W]hat makes Ahmed’s book so readable, and so read worthy, is that it is like the best forms of comedy. The kind of comedy that makes you laugh not because you have never experienced the kind of thing being described but, rather, because the thing being described is so common, so familiar, so ordinary, and yet by its rendering the comedian has refracted that experience through another lens. One that shows up the way things might be.” — Kim Brooks, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“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

“Engaging with a rich history of literature, theory, and film, Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness highlights the myriad ways in which happiness has been used to form our desires, goals, and aspirations. Throughout the book, Ahmed insightfully points to the ways in which the promise of happiness dictates how we live and, more importantly, how the path to this ideal is often fraught with much unhappiness for those who experience oppression and injustice.” — Kira Tomsons, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“For anyone interested in Feminist Theory or Feminist Philosophy this book should be most interesting, and for those engaged in Cultural Studies this book offers an exciting study of alternative theories of emotion.” — Jenell Navarro, Women's Studies

“Fresh in its premises and elegant in its follow-through, with plenty of incisive questions to move it along, The Promise of Happiness offers new lenses on an emotion rarely challenged. I suggest you make room for it on your shelf.” — Vani Natarajan, Feminist Review blog

“Many things from The Promise of Happiness will stay with me—indeed, her call for the ‘freedom to be unhappy’ may paralyze me as I next inscribe a friend’s birthday card. However, the most salient of these may be a heightened alertness to the conditions of possibility, the sense that happenings arise from complex facilitating elements.” — Robert Leckey, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

“The promise of happiness is useful for queer theorists, feminists (of various persuasions) and critical race theorists who are interested in exploring the place that the politics of unhappiness continues to hold in discourses about a more ethical world. Students who are coming to queer, feminist and critical race studies would also benefit from this book, especially as it traverses three study areas, drawing on many philosophers and key theorists along the way. Its use of texts and film to contextualise quite abstract and complex ideas around (un)happiness and affect also makes it a good read for students.” — Elizabeth Smith, Culture, Health & Sexuality

“There is an immediate appeal to work which so overtly brings happiness to the killjoys and melancholics, usually excluded from communities of happiness. It is the appeal of identification, however, which risks replicating the exclusions of which it complains. In this case, however, Ahmed’s killing joy should appeal not only to those who identify with her figures, but to those who are interested in philosophical and rigorous ethical debates.” — Carolyn Broomhead, Women: A Cultural Review

“This is a daring but welcome challenge in the context of a mainstream liberal metropolitan global north that celebrates the political achievements and legal changes for queer life as welcoming former sexual dissidents into the norm…. It offers is a counter-argument to dominant discourses about happiness and those who are seen to spoil it.” — Shamira A. Meghani, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“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

“T he 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

“ The Promise of Happiness bridges philosophy and cultural studies, phenomenology and feminist thought—providing a fresh and incisive approach to some of the most urgent contemporary feminist issues. Ahmed navigates this bridge with a voice both clear and warm to convey ideas that are as complex as they are intimate and accessible. Her treatment of affect as a phenomenological project provides feminist theorists a way out of mind-body divides without reverting to essentialisms, enabling Ahmed to attend to intersectional and global power relations with acuity and originality.” — Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Signs

“Ahmed enhances feminism’s critical toolbox by guiding us to regard affect as a cipher for society as we track how it produces and is produced by politics. ... Ahmed draws on feminism to potentially enhance the quality of life for her readers, who are offered mindful practices of relinquishing attachment to various ideals in a text that is neither Pollyannaish nor depressing.” — Naomi Greyser, Feminist Studies

“Ahmed’s analyses are spot-on and provocative. . . . Ahmed’s analysis of this and other topics is unpredictable and engaging.” — Heather Seggel, Gay & Lesbian Review

“Ahmed's language is a joy, and her work on each case study is filled with insight and rigor as she doggedly traces the social networks of dominance concealed and congealed around happiness. . . . The Promise of Happiness is an important intervention in affect studies that crucially approaches one of the major assumptions guiding social life: the assumption that we need to be happy.” — Sean Grattan, Social Text

“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

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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 .

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Sara Ahmed is the recipient of the 2017 Kessler Award, presented by CLAGS

Winner, 2011 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Award

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the promise of happiness.

There are many different types of "family novels" being written in today's insular world, and sadly not all of them are worth reading. There are those that read like personal memoirs --- maudlin accounts of dysfunctional upbringings and unforgotten family rifts that often sound like the author is using his or her writing to work through psychological problems left over from childhood (i.e. whining). There are also those that boast an overarching theory about The State of The Contemporary Family and a ripped-apart value system without really delivering a graspable narrative. And then there are those that, despite their minor flaws, deliver an amicable mix of engrossing story and "state-of-things philosophizing" so that by the time the book has concluded, its readers feel that they not only have had an entertaining and informative look-see into someone else's family life, but that they have also realized a thing or two about their own.

Man Booker-shortlisted and Whitbread-winning author Justin Cartwright's latest offering is thankfully the latter of the three. A slow-to-unfold yet rightfully deliberate stroll through the contours of human suffering and a story that recognizes the importance of hope as an offset to seemingly irreversible tragedy, THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS describes one family's pieced-together attempt at redemption following a far-reaching misfortune that threatens to break them apart permanently.

At 32, Juliet Judd is at the height of her life. She has a cheeky, hip gallery-owner boyfriend, a gorgeous Upper East Side apartment, an Oxford education and a prestigious job at the preeminent Christie's in New York. In the midst of it all, she is convicted of an alleged crime --- it is questionable whether she plays an active part in it or not --- and is sentenced to what turns out to be three years in prison. The fact that there were others responsible for stealing and reselling the Tiffany's glass window is beside the point, according to the court. She is the one who wrote the checks. She is the one with the prestigious reputation. She is the one who must take the fall.

In her absence, the Judd family silently unravels --- each in their own twisted struggle to reconcile the condemnation of their prodigal daughter/sister. Her father Charles loses his business as well as his grasp on reality, withering away into a frail shadow of his former self. Her mother Daphne realizes the depths of her unhappiness and tries to fill the seemingly endless empty hours with pointless cooking classes and gardening. Her sister Sophie drops out of school, starts doing drugs, and has an affair with her boss, twenty years her senior. Her brother Charlie, despite becoming successful in a burgeoning self-started Internet business, enters into a relationship with a gorgeous yet seemingly vacuous woman, Ana. Although Ana is pregnant and they have plans to marry, it is questionable as to whether or not Charlie actually loves her. Without Ju-Ju to hold the family together, the Judds flounder about, wounded and self-righteous in their efforts to block out what has befallen them.

Fast-forward three years and Juliet is being released from prison. In preparation for her return home, a number of intentional (and unintentional) transformations take place. Charlie plans to go ahead with the wedding and Daphne makes arrangements for an elaborate celebration --- bringing together her old family with the new, all in a blind hope to restore peace and humility to their shattered world. Sophie breaks up with her married boyfriend, takes out her nose ring (a small yet symbolic gesture) and plans to move home for the summer to get her life in gear. Even Charles, although he has the hardest time of it, takes pains to get past his depression enough to forgive his daughter (and himself) for all that has transpired in her absence.

What makes THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS so touching and worthwhile is not so much the actual circumstances of Charlie's, Sophie's, Daphne's, Charles's or Juliet's lives, but how each one deals with the randomness of what happens to them in relation to how they define themselves as individuals and as part of a breathing, functioning family unit in the world. "And so this is life. It is arbitrary; its narrative is erratic. [They] have been given a harsh understanding of the human condition. [They] didn't ask for it, or seek it." But they must keep moving and growing together, nonetheless.

As Tolstoy once wrote as the opening first lines to ANNA KARENINA, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Justin Cartwright's eighth novel is a true testament to the disparaging trials any family might encounter and to what ends they might have to travel to make it through to the other side.

Reviewed by Alexis Burling on January 23, 2011

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright

• Publication Date: July 10, 2007
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• ISBN-10: 1596913797
• ISBN-13: 9781596913790

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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A- : very fine family novel

See our review for fuller assessment.

   Review Consensus :   Not quite a consensus, but most very impressed    From the Reviews : "(D)ry, witty, but achy (.....) There is an air of desperation that hangs over the novel, but Cartwright is always slyly sympathetic to his characters and it's almost impossible not to become engrossed by the Judds and to root for them to achieve some sort of redemption." - Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor "Cartwright studiously avoids glib optimism, but it's clear from a relatively early stage that the novel's title isn't ironically intended. (...) Cartwright is a writer of considerable distinction and some of his characteristic strengths are traceable here -- most notably an eye for the minutiae of human behaviour and an ear finely attuned to the quirks and absurdities of contemporary speech. But judged by the high standards he has set himself, this is a rather disappointing novel." - Jem Poster, The Guardian "Cartwright generally achieves the fine balance of seeming both accessible and profound, mixing plot strands about Manhattan art theft, internet start-ups and Cornish cooking disasters with remarkable fluency." - Alfred Hickling, The Guardian "(A) beautifully observed, emotionally detailed novel about one family's decline and regeneration (.....) (A)n elegant if flawed novel that threads the comic and the tragic together into story that, at its best, is as affecting as it is gripping." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "I am hopeful that his bitingly funny and fiercely observed new novel, which won Britain's Hawthornden Prize and the South African Sunday Times' Literary Award, will open up a new readership on this side of the Atlantic. The Promise of Happiness is a sharp-eyed portrait of a contemporary English family whose members are each unhappy in his or her own way. (...) With a few minor lapses (...), Cartwright's novel is wonderfully well written. The savage irony and probing moral questioning nicely balance each other out, and as an exploration of contemporary Englishness -- "proud, ironic and ridiculous all at once" -- it is unsurpassed." - Tony Eprile, The New York Times Book Review "Perhaps it takes a South African novelist to describe an English middle-class family in such compendiously unironic detail. Cartwright never flinches; we often do. (...) This is a depressed book, its world view rancid and not easily redeemed." - Kate Kellaway, The Observer "This is a riveting, pitch-perfect exploration of the fine line that exists between tragedy and the English middle-class tradition of muddling along." - Simon Beckett, The Observer "The novel is busy with themes of guilt, redemption, morality and responsibility, but the characterisation is Cartwright�s great achievement. The five narrative voices are convincing and accomplished, with Charles the most successful character. (...) There are irritations, but they are minor. (...) But these are quibbles. The Promise of Happiness is a touching, beautifully observed novel written with precision and sympathy." - Olivia Glazebrook, The Spectator "Justin Cartwright's latest novel, The Promise of Happiness , is a lot better than good enough. The elegant assurance of its opening pages induces in the reader an almost incredulous admiration -- as for some astonishing feat of physical strength and grace -- that lasts right to the final sentence. (...) Cartwright beautifully and inexorably constructs a tragedy of noble reticence and oddness, in which even hope (for hope remains, at the bottom of the box, when all the sorrow and wickedness has emerged) has a changeling aspect." - Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph "Not the least of the achievements of The Promise of Happiness is in bringing into focus one sector of a fluid, bewildering and shallow society in which the nature of the shallowness is constantly shifting and adapting. (...) But the ending fails to bring together all the threads of a readable and adroitly observant narrative with quite the gravity and conviction the author intends." - Alan Brownjohn, Times Literary Supplement Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

     After a year in New York she knew her way around Manhattan and Long Island including Brooklyn and further afield up into the Bronx and Queens.

"We want your side of the story, exclusively, and of course we will pay."

About the Author :

       Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and educated in the United States and England. He has written several novels. In Every Face I Meet was shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Award, and Leading the Cheers won the 1998 Whitbread Award.

© 2006 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

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Promises, promises

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright Bloomsbury £16.99, pp307

The pleasures of Justin Cartwright's writing are immediate. He has, at his best, verve and a style as transparent as a window. But this, his eighth novel - which involves a window - is more opaque than usual.

A beautiful young woman, Juliet (educated at St Paul's and Oxford), has spent two years in an American prison for colluding in the illegal sale of a Tiffany window. The novel begins with her release from the Federal Correctional Facility in New York State. Cartwright describes the way in which her family have taken her punishment and examines a family at once unravelling and trying to pull itself together. A good story, even if you are, like her family, incredulous that Juliet has ended up in jail in the first place.

Perhaps it takes a South African novelist to describe an English middle-class family in such compendiously unironic detail. Cartwright never flinches; we often do. Charles Judd, Juliet's father, is a depressing figure who has left north London for Cornwall, a former accountant who paces coastal paths. He privately defines his retirement as the first step towards extinction and, in his self-involvement, neglects his wife and even fails to visit his daughter in prison, although Juliet (we learn by repetition) is the love of his life. There is so much repetition here.

Charles's wife, Daphne, is equally underwhelming, with her lumpen words: 'Deep down we have been conditioned to believe that somehow men have been granted custody of the life force.' She extends herself through ambitious recipes. There are many ongoing gags (gag is the word) about her cooking.

But it soon becomes clear that the whole novel is a burnt offering - a book about disenchantment and the difficulty of becoming re-enchanted. The Judd family curse is an inability to communicate emotion, and the result is that we care little about them. The most feeble scenes are those that have a stab at the redemptive (the moment in which daughter and father are finally reconciled is thrown away).

This is a depressed book, its world view rancid and not easily redeemed. Cartwright dwells on taboos (Charles's incestuous feeling for his daughters) and unsightly details (male legs get a bad press).

There are unsettling lurches of tone - lofty, then crude. Only paragraphs apart there is a line about 'a belief in the transcendent power of art' and then this: 'All the time she knew Richie was going down the toilet and she did nothing to help him.' Cartwright's teenagers speak in a street-foolish way, using 'like' all the time, but his ear is not quite good enough and the word lands in the wrong places.

The novel is full of labels - Amtico tiles and Paul Smith shirts. In the acknowledgments, Cartwright thanks Paula Pryke, the fashionable London florist, for her help with the flower arranging. All this adds to its perishable feel, as if it were setting its own sell-by date.

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The Promise of Happiness

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Copyright year: 2010
• Audience: Professional and scholarly;
• Main content: 326
• Published: April 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9780822392781

The Promise of Happiness

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 .

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.

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The Promise of Happiness By: Sara Ahmed https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781 ISBN (print): 978-0-8223-4666-1 ISBN (electronic): 978-0-8223-9278-1 Publisher: Duke University Press Published: 2010

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Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction : Why Happiness, Why Now? Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-001 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction<span class="subtitle-colon">: </span><span class="subtitle">Why Happiness, Why Now?</span> in another window
• Happy Objects Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-002 Open the PDF Link PDF for Happy Objects in another window
• Feminist Killjoys Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-003 Open the PDF Link PDF for Feminist Killjoys in another window
• Unhappy Queers Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-004 Open the PDF Link PDF for Unhappy Queers in another window
• Melancholic Migrants Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-005 Open the PDF Link PDF for Melancholic Migrants in another window
• Happy Futures Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-006 Open the PDF Link PDF for Happy Futures in another window
• Conclusion Happiness, Ethics, Possibility Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-007 Open the PDF Link PDF for Conclusion Happiness, Ethics, Possibility in another window
• Notes Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-008 Open the PDF Link PDF for Notes in another window
• References Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-009 Open the PDF Link PDF for References in another window
• Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781-010 Open the PDF Link PDF for Index in another window
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The Promise of Happiness: 'Extraordinarily bold ... a funny, angry, moving novel' Paperback – 19 April 2010

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A reissued edition of the 'bitingly funny and fiercely observed' Richard & Judy bestseller 'A compelling and candid portrait of a family in crisis' Mail on Sunday 'Impressive ... an intelligent, generous and unsentimental take on an English middle-class family' Telegraph Charles Judd meanders round his local Cornish beach, contemplating the turns his life has taken. His wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest fish recipe, trying to keep something in her life under control. Two of their children are keeping it all together - just. But they are all still recovering from the shock of the prodigal daughter, Juliet, being imprisoned in New York State for her part in an art theft. Since then, Charles appears to have lost his entire family. Now Juliet is being released, the family is about to be reunited and the wounds her imprisonment has caused are being re-opened.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Publication date 19 April 2010
• Dimensions 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
• ISBN-10 1408807076
• ISBN-13 978-1408807071
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Justin Cartwright's novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet , the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers , the acclaimed White Lightning , shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award, The Promise of Happiness , selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club and winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, The Song Before It Is Sung , To Heaven By Water , Other People's Money , winner of the Spears Novel of the Year, Lion Heart and, most recently, the acclaimed Up Against the Night . Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London. @justincartwrig1

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Paperbacks (19 April 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1408807076
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1408807071
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
• 12,454 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• 76,714 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• 81,118 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)

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Justin cartwright.

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The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (review)

• State University of New York Press
• Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 2012
• pp. 229-233
• View Citation

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The Promise of Happiness: A Novel Paperback – 10 July 2007

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"A beautifully observed, emotionally detailed novel about one family's decline and regeneration."― New York Times A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick (U.K.) Winner of 2005 Hawthornden Prize (U.K.) for Best Work of Imaginative Literature Winner of the 2005 South African Sunday Times Fiction Award The Promise of Happiness is an emotionally wrought and beautifully rendered novel about one family's attempt at reconciliation. The five members of the Judd family, reeling from a series of personal and professional blows, have each retreated into a private world. But the impending return of prodigal daughter Juliet, an art historian incarcerated in an upstate New York prison for helping to sell stolen Tiffany windows, brings the family together for the first time since her incarceration. As Juliet―once the apple of her father's eye―returns to England for her brother's wedding, the family grapples with their conflicting feelings for one another and the moral dilemmas that threaten to tear them apart.

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date 10 July 2007
• Dimensions 14.63 x 2.13 x 20.29 cm
• ISBN-10 1596913797
• ISBN-13 978-1596913790
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury USA; First Edition (10 July 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1596913797
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1596913790
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 295 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.63 x 2.13 x 20.29 cm

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Justin cartwright.

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The Promise of Happiness Paperback – April 6, 2010

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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.

• Print length 328 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Duke University Press Books
• Publication date April 6, 2010
• Dimensions 6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0822347253
• ISBN-13 978-0822347255
• See all details

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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 .

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The promise of happiness, duke university press, chapter one.

Excerpted from The Promise of Happiness by SARA AHMED Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Duke University Press Books; 59856th edition (April 6, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 328 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0822347253
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0822347255
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• #130 in Phenomenological Philosophy
• #687 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
• #1,605 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality

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