Queer Communal Postcolonial Happiness in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

When one examines recent scholarship on queer and postcolonial individuals, happiness is generally not the first quality that comes to mind. This paper will demonstrate, however, that while queer theory's insistence on the right to be unhappy appears contradictory to the politics of postcolonial happiness, queer theory's concepts of alternate temporalities and queer futurity have much to add to the conversation surrounding postcolonial happiness, as put forth by Ananya Jahanara Kabir in The Postcolonial World.