Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt(Contemporary Continental Ethics)

About the Book

Is there a way of being human that could invite people away from today's models of violence and consumerism? Looking forward to a new, increasingly creolized century, in 1997 the Martinican poet and philosopher douard Glissant asked, 'Do we have the right and the means to live another dimension of humanity? But how?'

Building on the defense of human rights he outlined in Choose Your Bearing, Benjamin P. Davis traces figures of 'the human' and 'humanity' in W. E. B. Du Bois, douard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said. He concludes with a reflection on Hannah Arendt's post-war correspondence with Karl Jaspers, which offers lessons for a new humanism as we witness ongoing wars today.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Thinking Race and Humanity Together (An Attempt) Critiques of ‘The Human’ Defenses of ‘The Human’ Conceptual Sufficiency and Stuart Hall’s Politics without Guarantees Chapter Outline Part I: Detour through Theory Chapter One: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Anti-War Humanism Du Bois’s Use of ‘Humanity’ in Black Reconstruction and John Brown Du Bois’s Use of Human Rights in the 1940s Notes toward a Du Boisian Politics Chapter Two: Édouard Glissant’s Relational Humanism The Importance of Poetry ‘The Human’ across Glissant’s Theoretical Work Returning to the Ancestors Part II: Risking the Personal Chapter Three: Sylvia Wynter’s Ceremonial Humanism ‘The Human’ in Wynter Secular Criticism Natural Law and Humanism Returning to Ceremony Chapter Four: Edward Said’s Post-colonial Humanism Representations Style Positionality Coda Chapter Five: Hannah Arendt’s Ordinary Humanism Caught in Categories Contradictions Giving an Account An Ethics of Correspondence Bibliography Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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. In a concentrated attitude of modesty, reflexiveness, and provocation, Another Humanity offers a searching practice of redressive criticism animated by the historical wrong of colonial dispossession. Reading the 'human' through Du Bois, Glissant, Wynter, Said, and Arendt, Benjamin Davis encourages us to see the problem of 'humanity' as the inescapable core of an alternative contemporary politics. In Another Humanity, Benjamin P. Davis unpacks the outline of an unfolding crescendo of critical thinking to locate our fragile humanity on a more leveled ground. Like a defiant Sisyphus, at a time when Americans have elected a president who defies every single sense of human decency, Davis insists on righting the wrong, rolling the boulder up the hill. Another Humanity is a brilliant book—its brilliance lies in its humility. Rather than creating new concepts out of thin air, it engages with existing ideas, traces their entanglement in histories of asymmetrical power, and revitalizes them as tools and lenses for imagining and realizing a decolonial future. Davis’s book successfully experiments with a different political and ethical attitude toward theory and the world—and it invites us to do the same. Its willingness to extend its argument beyond the ivory towers of academic debate lends it additional value; specifically, it offers relevant, practical commentary that connects the thoughts of 20th-century luminaries to contemporary 21st-century geopolitics, particularly on issues affecting the Middle East.