Choose Your Bearing

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.

• Introduction: Starting from Responsibility and Human RightsThesis and Chapter OutlineChapter One: The Right to Opacity in Theory Toward an Alternative Ethical VocabularyAlterity and Encounter Read in ContextContacts, Relays, OpacitiesThe Right to Opacity and Human RightsChapter Two: The Right to Opacity in Practice The Critical-Reformist TensionThree Approaches to Human RightsThe Paradigmatic ApproachThe Critical ApproachThe Organizational ApproachThe Three Approaches at Work and the Promises of Standing RockChapter Three: Solidarity beyond ParticipationInstitutions and ImaginariesRoots: Identity and BelongingRelations: Solidarity, Anarchy, and GenerosityRoot Identity and Relation IdentityExpansive BelongingChapter Four: The Feasibility of Ethical PursuitsFeasibilityThe Other of ThoughtLa FacultadDeslenguadaEntanglementsMaking KinChapter Five: The Limits of Ethics and the Question of Political Commitment Summary of StudyThe Limits of EthicsThe Question of Political CommitmentW. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of Elite Human Rights DiscourseBibliography

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.