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.

The Promise of Happiness

Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.

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The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

Attention to global and world cities has directed the field of urban studies to the significance of international and transnational processes in shaping city economies. This article evaluates these approaches, from a position off their maps. I argue that the circulation of these approaches in academic and policy realms adversely impacts on cities which do not fall into these categories by setting up the idea of the global city as a ‘regulating fiction’, a standard towards which they aspire. It establishes a small sector of the global economy as most desirable in planning the future of cities. By contrast, mega–cities function as the dramatic ‘other’ of world and global cities, and highlight the developmentalist discourse through which most cities in poor countries are assessed as fundamentally lacking in qualities of city–ness. I argue that the long–standing categories of western/third–world cities have been translated into the apparently transnational accounts of global and world cities. Western cities continue to be the primary site of production of apparently unlocated urban theory; so–called third–world cities (and other cities off the map of the world cities cartography) are interpreted through a developmentalist lens and, where they are referred to at all, are framed in terms of ‘difference’ or irrelevance. This article draws attention to the emergence of an alternative set of theoretical approaches, which are more inclusive in their geographical reach and which are concerned with the diverse dynamics of ordinary cities. These approaches have not yet realized that they have the potential to broaden the base for theorizing about cities and, with this in mind, the article explores the potential for a more cosmopolitan urban theory. The policy stakes in this are high, and the article notes that there are important political reasons to promote the analysis of ordinary cities in the face of the persistence of ambitions in many cities to become ‘world cities‘.

L’attention accordee aux villes planetaires et mondiales a oriente le champ des etudes urbaines vers l’importance des processus internationaux et transnationaux dans la configuration economique des villes. Partant d’un point situe hors de leur cartographie, l’article evalue ces approches. La circulation de celles–ci dans les spheres politiques et intellectuelles a une incidence nefaste sur les villes qui n’appartiennent pas a ces categories, car elle instaure l’idee d’une ville planetaire en tant que ‘fiction regulatrice’, norme a laquelle aspirent les villes. Un secteur restreint de l’economie mondiale est ainsi etabli comme le plus recherche dans la planification urbaine. Par contraste, les megacities fonctionnent comme l’impressionnant ‘autre’ des villes mondiales et planetaires, valorisant le discours developpementaliste selon lequel l’evaluation des villes des pays pauvres indique le plus souvent des lacunes fondamentales dans les qualites propres a une ville. Les anciennes categories de villes (Occident/tiers–monde) ont ete converties en justifications apparemment transnationales des villes planetaires et mondiales. Les villes occidentales restent le site de production principal d’une theorie urbaine manifestement non–localisee; les villes dites du tiers monde (et autres villes ignorees de la cartographie des villes mondiales) sont interpretees a travers une optique developpementaliste et, si on en parle, sont depeintes en termes de ‘difference‘ ou d’inadequation. Cet article souligne l’emergence d’un autre ensemble d’approches theoriques, plus inclusives dans leur geographie et soucieuses des diverses dynamiques des villes ordinaires. Sachant que ces demarches ne sont pas encore conscientes de pouvoir etendre la base theorique sur les villes, l’article explore la possibilite d’une theorie urbaine plus cosmopolite. Les enjeux strategiques sont serieux et il existe des raisons politiques importantes d’encourager l’analyse des villes ordinaires face aux ambitions persistantes dans de nombreuses villes de devenir les ‘villes mondiales’.

Global and world cities: a view from off the map

This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn’t already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.

Venus in Two Acts

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and Director of the Center of Documentation on the Revolution of 1974, at the same University. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French and German.

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Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges

On the Postcolony

* Foreword. Penelope Andrews* Preface and Acknowledgments* Introduction. Law, Expertise, and Protean Ideas about African Migrants Benjamin N. Lawrance, Iris Berger, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Joanna T. Tague, and Meredith Terretta*1. Before Asylum and the Expert Witness Mozambican Refugee Settlement and Rural Development in Southern Tanzania, 1964-75 Joanna T. Tague*2. Fraudulent Asylum Seeking as Transnational Mobilization The Case of Cameroon Meredith Terretta*3. The Evolving Refugee Definition How Shifting Elements of Eligibility Affect the Nature and Focus of Expert Testimony in Asylum Proceedings Karen Musalo*4. Expert Evidence in British Asylum Courts The Judicial Assessment of Evidence on Ethnic Discrimination and Statelessness in Ethiopia John Campbell*5. "The Immigration People Know the Stories. There's One for Each Country" The Case of Mauritania E . Ann McDougall*6. Cultural Silences as an Excuse for Injustice The Problems of Documentary Proof Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman*7. Between Advocacy and Deception Crafting an African Asylum Narrative Iris Berger*8. Allegations, Evidence, and Evaluation Asylum Seeking in a World of Witchcraft Katherine Luongo*9. Sexual Minorities among African Asylum Claimants Human Rights Regimes, Bureaucratic Knowledge, and the Era of Sexual Rights Diplomacy Charlotte Walker-Said*10. The "Asylum-Advocacy Nexus" in Anthropological Perspective Agency, Activism, and the Construction of Eritrean Political Identities Tricia Redeker Hepner* Afterword Fallou Ngom* About the Authors* Index

African asylum at a crossroads : activism, expert testimony, and refugee rights

INTRODUCTION: Law, Expertise, and Protean Ideas about African Migrants

This introduction elaborates the aims of the Special Issue, African Refuge | Refuge africain, which are: considering African refuge seeking over the span of a century; moving beyond the classificat...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00083968.2021.1882316

Historical perspectives on contemporary refuge seeking in Africa

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Meredith Terretta

Papers

On the Postcolony

African asylum at a crossroads : activism, expert testimony, and refugee rights

INTRODUCTION: Law, Expertise, and Protean Ideas about African Migrants

Historical perspectives on contemporary refuge seeking in Africa

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Actions