In this chapter, Ahmed examines how political discourse surrounding multiculturalism in the United Kingdom associates social cohesion with happiness and positions integration as a means of achieving it. Beginning with Trevor Phillips’s account of multiculturalism as a source of unhappiness, Ahmed shows how the promise of a happier multicultural society can place a “happiness duty” on migrants, who are expected to demonstrate their belonging through proximity to established national values. She connects this contemporary expectation to earlier imperial uses of happiness, particularly the utilitarian idea that colonial rule could increase the happiness of populations represented as requiring improvement or direction. This connection reveals a recurring association between happiness and movement toward British habits, values, and forms of belonging. Ahmed’s readings of films and memoirs examine how this association enters narratives of migrant freedom, belonging, and racial difference, while taking different forms across the lives she considers. The historical connection therefore allows Ahmed to show how earlier associations between Britishness, improvement, and happiness can remain present in contemporary expectations of migrant belonging.

Ahmed’s historical connection between contemporary integration and 19th-century utilitarian thought shows how ideas of happiness have been used to define improvement in relation to British values. Utilitarianism, with its goal of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (123), could provide a language through which colonial rule was represented as beneficial to those subjected to it. Ahmed draws on John Bruce of the East India Company, who explicitly justified British rule in India through its supposed capacity to increase happiness, before turning to James Mill’s writings to examine how colonized subjects could be represented as requiring redirection toward English habits and values. This history informs Ahmed’s reading of contemporary citizenship as a “happiness test,” in which belonging involves demonstrating proximity to particular versions of Britishness and national history. A positive account of empire can therefore become part of the terms through which national belonging is recognized, while histories of colonial violence and injury can become difficult to voice without disrupting that account. This analysis develops The Exclusionary Nature of the Good Life from socially approved ways of living to the terms of national belonging: Access to the nation’s promise of happiness can depend on alignment with particular national values and with versions of history that racialized subjects may experience differently.

Ahmed develops the figure of the “melancholic migrant” to examine how remaining affected by histories of racism can be interpreted as an obstacle to individual and national happiness. The figure describes how migrants can be positioned as melancholic when their continued attention to racial injury is understood as an inability to “get over” the past. This interpretation locates the source of present unhappiness in the migrant’s attachment to racial injury, allowing racism itself to be treated as something that belongs to the past. Ahmed’s analysis of the film Bend It Like Beckham develops this idea through Jess’s father, whose memory of racial exclusion shapes his response to his daughter’s pursuit of happiness through football. Because football also functions as an object of national identification, his eventual acceptance of Jess’s path links his movement beyond past injury to the happiness associated with national belonging. The “melancholic migrant” therefore exposes how narratives of happy multiculturalism can depend on treating “unhappy histories” of racism as something migrants should move beyond.

Ahmed extends her analysis to second-generation daughters to examine what happens when movement toward Britishness does not deliver the belonging and happiness associated with it. In Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, Meena’s desire for Englishness is shaped by her own attachments and experiences of racial difference, while her eventual declaration “I am the others” marks an identification with those excluded from the Englishness she had desired (152). In Yasmin Hai’s The Making of Mr. Hai’s Daughter, her father encourages her to become English, yet this process also involves losses, including her connection to Urdu and, through it, to her mother. Hai’s later awareness of racism also places her out of step with the “public mood” (157), making her what Ahmed calls an “affect alien.” Her experience shows how the promise that greater proximity to Britishness will bring belonging can remain unfulfilled when racism continues to shape who is recognized as belonging. Here, Unhappiness as Political Resistance develops through remaining affected by racism and its histories after they are treated as belonging to the past. Such unhappiness keeps these histories present within accounts of national happiness that can require migrants to move beyond them. Ahmed therefore leaves open a form of belonging in which people do not have to find happiness in the same objects, while recognizing that those objects remain shaped by histories of racism and empire.