Choose Your Bearing

One of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard 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 Édouard 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 Anzaldúa 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.