Mundane Joy as Emergent Strategy: Community Storytellers on “Happiness,” “Resilience,” and the “Good Life”

Abstract

This essay traces how community-based activist storytellers make room for emergent strategies in perilous times. It was sparked by the authors’ experience of working between two distinct communities that are both deeply invested in understanding the function of story-and-art-making in troubled and troubling times. For brevity’s sake, we will refer to the first community as the collective of “arts-based community-making” groups with whom we work under the auspices of the Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Our second community is the Spain-based RESHAP international group of literary and cultural studies scholars who are studying the theme of “Narrativas de la felicidad y la resiliencia / Narratives of Happiness and Resilience.” In the context of “risk society”—the widespread perception of life on earth as dangerous, vulnerable, and fraught with complex hazards—popular media, governments, and corporations, in addition to school systems, public think tanks, and the self-help industry often urge people to generate what Sara Ahmed has called “happiness scripts,” to keep positive and be resilient. These “scripts” become directive, insofar as stories of happiness, the good life, or resilience become mechanisms of discipline or coercive governance that can elicit what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.” Our essay teases out the emergent possibilities, the creative potential, that we see arising from community-based story-makers’ navigation of the tension between these (required) stories of the “good life” and the everyday, emergent strategies they invent in the midst of challenging times.