Another Humanity

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.

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 … A rare combination of academic heft and impassioned prose.

• PrefaceIntroduction: Thinking Race and Humanity Together (An Attempt)Critiques of ‘The Human’Defenses of ‘The Human’Conceptual Sufficiency and Stuart Hall’s Politics without GuaranteesChapter OutlinePart I: Detour through Theory1. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Anti-War HumanismDu Bois’s Use of ‘Humanity’ in Black Reconstruction and John BrownDu Bois’s Use of Human Rights in the 1940sNotes toward a Du Boisian Politics2. Édouard Glissant’s Relational Humanism The Importance of Poetry‘The Human’ across Glissant’s Theoretical WorkReturning to the AncestorsPart II: Risking the Personal3. Sylvia Wynter’s Ceremonial Humanism‘The Human’ in WynterSecular CriticismNatural Law and HumanismReturning to Ceremony4. Edward Said’s Post-colonial HumanismRepresentationsStylePositionalityCoda5. Hannah Arendt’s Ordinary HumanismCaught in CategoriesContradictionsGiving an AccountAn Ethics of CorrespondenceBibliographyIndex