Choose Your Bearing

Poet and philosopher Edouard 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.

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One of the first readings, in English or French, of Edouard Glissant as an ethical theorist

Brings together Caribbean and Latin American ethics to provide a new concept of responsibility that addresses inequities rooted in colonial projects
Re-envisions contemporary human rights practice based on the duties entailed in the decolonial (third-generation) rights claims made by the dispossessed
Connects Glissant's claim of a 'right to opacity' to ethical bearings, and by doing so presents a path for human rights and decolonial movements to come together

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 douard 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 Anzald a 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.