Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics - Paperback

by Benjamin P. Davis (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

Reads Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist 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. Benjamin P. Davis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Saint Louis University.

Author Biography

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).