Choose Your Bearing - (Contemporary Continental Ethics) by Benjamin P Davis

About the Book

Poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant called his readers to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: 'You must choose your bearing'. 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

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

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.

--Gerard Laurence Aching, Cornell University

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.

--Samuel Moyn, Yale University

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.

--Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto

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)'.--Morten Bergsmo "Journal of Peace Research"

About the Author

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).