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Contemporary Continental Ethics

Choose Your BearingÉdouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics

By Benjamin P. Davis

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£90.00

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About this book

One of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist

  • Brings together Caribbean and Latin American ethics to provide a new concept of responsibility that addresses inequities rooted in colonial projects
  • Re-envisions contemporary human rights practice based on the duties entailed in the decolonial (third-generation) rights claims made by the dispossessed
  • Connects Glissant’s claim of a ‘right to opacity’ to ethical bearings, and by doing so presents a path for human rights and decolonial movements to come together


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 Édouard 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 Anzaldúa 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

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.

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.

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.

In this ethically bracing and philosophically wide-ranging intervention, Benjamin Davis calls on Édouard 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.

In this well-written monograph, the US philosopher Benjamin P Davis presents a penetrating reading of Édouard 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)’.
Table of contents

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

    About the author

    Benjamin P. Davis

    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: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics, also by Edinburgh University Press.

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