Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt

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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.

Reviews

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. -- Paul Gilroy, University of London
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. -- David Scott, Columbia University
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. -- Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University
Another Humanity is a brilliant bookits 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. Daviss book successfully experiments with a different political and ethical attitude toward theory and the worldand it invites us to do the same. -- Massimiliano Tomba, University of California, Santa Cruz
...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[.] -- Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Benjamin P. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Simone Weils Political Philosophy as well as Choose Your Bearing: douard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics, also by Edinburgh University Press.