Images of the search for happiness in African Literature

In this lecture, I will present a brief summary of the first part of my project on the Images of the Search for Happiness in African Literature written in Portuguese. We will see how the idea of happiness has changed throughout time with philosophers, writers and historical events in the world. We will further see that although happiness has an individual weight, it has a very important role that is constructed in a collectivity and determines the social group ambitions. We will call attention to the interdisciplinarity aspects that are fundamental for the research on happiness in literature. 

Although large parts of modern philosophy concentrates on anguish and depression, happiness has been the subject of a great quest throughout human history. The main goal of this project was to study the search for happiness within African literatures written in Portuguese where it has assumed an important role to literary autonomy.