Aminatta Forna’s Happiness

Aminatta Forna’s Happiness

Session type: Panel

Organized by: Ernest Cole

Send abstracts or inquiries to: colee@hope.edu

Aminatta Forna’s Happiness is an epic novel. Ranging from psychiatry to wildlife biology, pop culture to trauma studies, ecological literature to psychology, the novel depicts human life as defined by and in coexistence with animals, nature and the environment, violence and traumatic memory, migration, love, and death.
A predominant theme in the novel is trauma and the suffering that constitutes traumatic memory. However, the novel posits a new construct of post-traumatic stress disorder that makes a distinction between symptoms and emotions, and argues for a paradox in which agency and joy can be reclaimed from traumatic memory.
Exploring the paradigm that trauma is not damage, and that suffering is integral to human experience, this panel solicits proposals on Happiness that engage the interconnections between violence and trauma, human and animal coexistence, the challenges and opportunities confronting the African diaspora, and nature and the environment.
Please send abstracts of proposals to Ernest Cole, PhD, at colee@hope.edu no later than 31 March, 2018.