How to be hopeful in a dystopic present? rethinking future-oriented narratives in Aminatta Forna’s happiness

Abstract

This article is concerned with affective, narratological, and environmental networks in Aminatta Forna’s 2018 novel, Happiness. In this novel, Forna asks us to attend to the planetary relations at play in the global city of London. Although the novel is not dystopic in a strict sense, by rethinking the temporality of happiness narratives, it makes clear that our current situation is. Happiness combines narrative, emotions, and environments at both the thematic and structural level, such that spatial and temporal forms foreground affective relations and the ecological. It is by analysing these aspects of the novel that we ask what a rethinking of future-oriented narratives of happiness and hope may offer us in the current planetary crisis of climate change. In our reading we will combine insights from happiness studies and narratology to analyse seemingly distant but interconnected affective and ecological logics in what Lauren Berlant identifies an “affective present”.