Choose Your Bearing

Benjamin Davis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies, Saint Louis University, USA. He is the author of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) and the co-editor of Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

• Introduction: Starting from Responsibility and Human RightsThesis and Chapter OutlineChapter One: The Right to Opacity in TheoryToward an Alternative Ethical VocabularyAlterity and Encounter Read in ContextContacts, Relays, OpacitiesThe Right to Opacity and Human RightsChapter Two: The Right to Opacity in PracticeThe 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 CommitmentSummary of StudyThe Limits of EthicsThe Question of Political CommitmentW. E. B. Du Bois’s Critique of Elite Human Rights DiscourseBibliography

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 New Bones Abolition and Contextualizing Angela Davis