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.

• AcknowledgmentsPrefaceIntroduction: Thinking Race and Humanity Together (An Attempt)Critiques of ‘The Human’Defenses of ‘The Human’Conceptual Sufficiency and Stuart Hall’s Politics without GuaranteesChapter OutlinePart I: Detour through TheoryChapter One: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Anti-War HumanismDu Bois’s Use of ‘Humanity’ in Black Reconstruction and John BrownDu Bois’s Use of Human Rights in the 1940sNotes toward a Du Boisian PoliticsChapter Two: Édouard Glissant’s Relational Humanism The Importance of Poetry‘The Human’ across Glissant’s Theoretical WorkReturning to the AncestorsPart II: Risking the PersonalChapter Three: Sylvia Wynter’s Ceremonial Humanism‘The Human’ in WynterSecular CriticismNatural Law and HumanismReturning to CeremonyChapter Four: Edward Said’s Post-colonial HumanismRepresentationsStylePositionalityCodaChapter Five: Hannah Arendt’s Ordinary HumanismCaught in CategoriesContradictionsGiving an AccountAn Ethics of CorrespondenceBibliographyIndex

This provocative book suggests that the tide has turned against sophistry and fatalism. Benjamin Davis has joyfully demonstrated that they are not the most sophisticated kinds of 'theory' after all.