
Choose Your Bearing
Edouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics
Benjamin P. Davis(Author)
Edinburgh University Press
Published on 1. August 2023
Book
Hardback
264 pages
978-1-3995-2243-4 (ISBN)
Description
What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded?
Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: 'You must choose your bearing'.
Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldua and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present - an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility.
Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: 'You must choose your bearing'.
Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldua and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present - an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility.
Reviews / Votes
Davis' book rigorously argues for a sense of political commitment based on the responsibilities that come with the inescapable and future entanglements of subjects and communities who are always implicated and global. Choose Your Bearing provides us with a compelling guide for thinking and acting ethically in the contemporary world. -- Gerard Laurence Aching, Cornell University Choose Your Bearing commits to inclusive universal rights and protections for natural environments. Interweaving philosophy and history, Benjamin Davis presents an elegant account of the contributions, contradictions, and betrayals of human rights advocacy within anti-colonial struggles. Referencing Glissant, Said, Marx, Du Bois and other intellectuals, this book engages ethics, diverse ethnic identities, and the structural antagonisms between colonizers and the colonized. Choose Your Bearing offers a succinct study of intellectuals and care-givers who improvised a common language for political advocacy; thus, it clarifies how to stabilize current resistance to imperialism and predatory powers. -- Joy James, author of <i>New Bones Abolition</i> and <i>Contextualizing Angela Davis</i> This careful study sheds light on a neglected figure, Glissant, even as it argues persuasively for the ongoing, complicated relevance of human rights discourse in contemporary politics. An important addition to political theory, at once invigorating and enlightening, especially as it confronts racial and cultural difference. -- Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto In this ethically bracing and philosophically wide-ranging intervention, Benjamin Davis calls on Edouard Glissant to help reimagine human rights for a politics that requires more awareness of and responsibility for global hierarchy and oppression. Human rights are not beyond reproach but they are also not unsalvageable, if they are reforged as credible tools for emancipation, as Glissant and others have foreseen. -- Samuel Moyn, Yale University In this well-written monograph, the US philosopher Benjamin P Davis presents a penetrating reading of Edouard Glissant (1928-2011) [...] Steeped in the relevant literature, Davis questions whether our current social justice tools, human rights included, are sufficient to bring about 'needed social change, change that would honour and preserve life on earth' and help us 'move from a politics of charity (false generosity and tolerance) to a politics of participation (errancy and solidarity)'. -- Morten Bergsmo * Journal of Peace Research *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-2243-4 (9781399522434)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
06/2023
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€14.99
Available for download

E-Book
06/2023
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€14.99
Available for download
Person
Benjamin P. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Simone Weil's Political Philosophy as well as Choose Your Bearing: Edouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics, also by Edinburgh University Press.
Author
Postdoctoral Fellow in African American StudiesSaint Louis University, USA.
Content
Introduction: Starting from Responsibility and Human Rights
Thesis and Chapter Outline
Chapter One: The Right to Opacity in Theory
Toward an Alternative Ethical Vocabulary
Alterity and Encounter Read in Context
Contacts, Relays, Opacities
The Right to Opacity and Human Rights
Chapter Two: The Right to Opacity in Practice
The Critical-Reformist Tension
Three Approaches to Human Rights
The Paradigmatic Approach
The Critical Approach
The Organizational Approach
The Three Approaches at Work and the Promises of Standing Rock
Chapter Three: Solidarity beyond Participation
Institutions and Imaginaries
Roots: Identity and Belonging
Relations: Solidarity, Anarchy, and Generosity
Root Identity and Relation Identity
Expansive Belonging
Chapter Four: The Feasibility of Ethical Pursuits
Feasibility
The Other of Thought
La Facultad
Deslenguada
Entanglements
Making Kin
Chapter Five: The Limits of Ethics and the Question of Political Commitment
Summary of Study
The Limits of Ethics
The Question of Political Commitment
W. E. B. Du Bois's Critique of Elite Human Rights Discourse
Bibliography
Thesis and Chapter Outline
Chapter One: The Right to Opacity in Theory
Toward an Alternative Ethical Vocabulary
Alterity and Encounter Read in Context
Contacts, Relays, Opacities
The Right to Opacity and Human Rights
Chapter Two: The Right to Opacity in Practice
The Critical-Reformist Tension
Three Approaches to Human Rights
The Paradigmatic Approach
The Critical Approach
The Organizational Approach
The Three Approaches at Work and the Promises of Standing Rock
Chapter Three: Solidarity beyond Participation
Institutions and Imaginaries
Roots: Identity and Belonging
Relations: Solidarity, Anarchy, and Generosity
Root Identity and Relation Identity
Expansive Belonging
Chapter Four: The Feasibility of Ethical Pursuits
Feasibility
The Other of Thought
La Facultad
Deslenguada
Entanglements
Making Kin
Chapter Five: The Limits of Ethics and the Question of Political Commitment
Summary of Study
The Limits of Ethics
The Question of Political Commitment
W. E. B. Du Bois's Critique of Elite Human Rights Discourse
Bibliography