Another Humanity
Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt
Offers a new reading of humanity in decolonial theory
- Articulates an original humanism informed by decolonial and post-colonial theory
- Advances an ethical theory across Black Studies, Caribbean philosophy, and Continental philosophy
- Defends the concepts of ‘the human’ and ‘humanity’
- Outlines a more constructive critical theory in our hyper-critical moment
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 Édouard 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, Édouard 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.
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
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.
