Choose Your Bearing

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 *