Looking back at the three or four years it took to write and revise this book, I can say that it has become something different from what I had originally envisioned. This project started as a relatively narrow intervention into how a line of Latin American philosophy that Enrique Dussel called ‘the philosophy of liberation’, what is increasingly called ‘decolonial philosophy’, took up the ethical vocabulary of Emmanuel Levinas. My argument remains that Édouard Glissant's relative ethics of opacity is more capable of speaking to today's ethical problems and possibilities than Levinas's absolute ethics of alterity. As I revised this book over the past year and read the work of, as well as engaged in conversation with, a few others – Gerard Aching, Kris Sealey, Nancy Mithlo, Neil Roberts, Allison Weir, LaRose Parris, Frieda Ekotto and Chris Tinson especially – I started to think of the book differently. In its placement in this series, and in the questions it raises, Choose Your Bearing can be read as asking Continental ethics and human rights discourse to take seriously Caribbean philosophy and Indigenous philosophy, and by extension Black Studies and Indigenous Studies, as sites of critical theory, epistemological correctives, and conceptual creation. What results from this engagement is a political theory that can no longer assume that the nation state protects rights, an ethical theory that can no longer withdraw into carefree abstractions, and a human rights discourse that can no longer maintain the goal of ‘developing’ humans, cultures and economies. Perhaps from such a renewed philosophy, one that looks back to Caribbean philosophy in the past century, we will gain ethical modes attuned to the rhythms of this century. At the very least, we will take one step toward a truer academic philosophy, one finally made to the measure of the world.

The Critical-Reformist Tension

This chapter begins from and stays with two tensions regarding theorising the state. The first is perhaps the constitutive tension in scholarship on human rights: the understanding of the modern state as both predatory and protective. In his 2013 Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Jack Donnelly observes that ‘the modern state has emerged as both the principal threat to the enjoyment of human rights and the essential institution for their effective implementation and enforcement’. He goes on to place his faith in human rights to prohibit ‘a wide range of state interferences’ and thereby to carve out ‘zones of state exclusion’. In this way, ‘human rights place the people above and in positive control of their government’, a position achieved through ‘extensive rights of political participation’. Donnelly's trajectory moves toward ‘the moral standing of the state’, concluding with ‘paths of incremental change’. His position epitomises what I will call ‘the critical-reformist tension’, which notes and criticises state-caused rights violations before returning to a call for state reform. This first tension is important because many justice-oriented actors feel it today. It leads to conflicting demands for practice. It is carried out in practice when students consider the risk of working as radical artists, activists or community organisers only to go to law school before garnering stable jobs in government or accepting positions at prestigious NGOs.

James Griffin's 2008 On Human Rights typifies a thin version of the critical-reformist tension. Griffin's analysis of human rights violations centres not state violence but relations between rights, such as how a state's enforcement of welfare rights can violate liberty rights. Ultimately, he argues that ‘states are the main agents of security of person’ and that ‘in some states one can vote and enjoy the protection of the police and army without being a citizen, but only citizenship makes their possession secure’. In stressing police protection, Griffin lacks a robust accounting for Indigenous displacement and police violence. His focus on security, which comes at the expense of attending to state predation on made-precarious peoples, recalls A. Dirk Moses’ recent observation that ‘the security imperative can justify permanent occupation, that is, colonial rule’. This point brings me to the second tension.

Summary of Study

Today many humanitarian and human rights organisations project their ethical ideals through colonial models of development and protection. A more critical strand of human rights discourse responds to acknowledged global injustices with minimal demands that are simply not enough to challenge capitalism and coloniality. In light of this context, Choose Your Bearing has argued that if theorists of rights discourse are to take decolonial concerns seriously, we will both recognise the nation state as a generally predatory entity (against minorities and immigrants) and move from a model of minimal advocacy for the downtrodden to a model of maximal activism. In this way, we would make demands on the institutions and actors that keep a majority of people across the world down in the first place. Conversely, this book has also suggested that decolonial theory should reconsider its critique of human rights. The primary and secondary duties that third-generation (solidarity) rights claims entail provide a way for people to connect to decolonial work through the terms that are already the most important to them. More specifically, the duties of Glissant's right to opacity fall on elite actors in the West. Standing with others is a primary duty that supports the right to opacity in an age of colonial resource extraction and blatant violations of land rights across the planet. Enacting the secondary duties around the right to opacity could look like attending to what we purchase or boycott, where we live, to what we belong, whom we consider kin, and what risks we are willing to take in our personal and professional lives. As opposed to the position- and career-maintaining efforts of professional reforms, this is ethical work found in much more banal, much less prestigious disengagements from professional spaces as they are. But this is not a withdrawal in the sense of denying the world. Like a boycott, this is an action verified by a community, and this community can be organised by rights claims made in different parts of the world. Its collective actions aim to uphold political, economic and cultural rights internationally. In this way, the local mode of engagement that lives out the primary and secondary duties of a right to opacity embodies a provincial bearing that does not become a provincialism, but that instead participates in a radical internationalism (DA 438/CD 146).

In a 2020 op-ed in The Guardian, Nemonte Nenquimo, a leader of the Waorani people, an Indigenous nation whose home is the Amazon rainforest, stated: ‘This is my message to the western world – your civilization is killing life on earth.’ Could this be true? Could a way of life in one place not only harm people and damage environments in other places, but also destroy life itself across the planet? If this is true, then do those in the West have a duty to change their way of life? How could this change occur across societies? Are the concepts and ideas we currently use to speak about social justice, such as human rights, sufficient to bring about this needed social change, change that would honour and preserve life on earth?

This book's argument rests on the following premises: as a result of European colonisation, the way of life in any Western country today relies on resource extraction and commodity production in other countries it thereby renders poor. This international division of labour involves practices that deny the human rights – the political, economic and cultural rights – of the workers who mine the minerals, sew the clothes, and otherwise provide the basic substances for life in the West. Fair trade programmes and wage increases do not change the fact that some spend their days hunched over sewing machines while others continually update their wardrobes.

Even a cursory reading of international news, or literature from a variety of places, makes clear that the West's way of life depends on resource extraction that violates human rights in different parts of the planet. Poor people the world over often make ethical appeals asking people in the West to change their basic habits of living in order to allow for others to live, to live with dignity, and to live amidst sustaining land and water. By leveraging rights claims in pronouncing what dominant powers have tried to silence, philosophers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Édouard Glissant have also called for the West to change its political and economic foundations.

Toward an Alternative Ethical Vocabulary

Contemporary ethical theory needs to speak to globalisation and coloniality. Globalisation has generated social relations in which lifestyles and values are somewhat shared. Across the world, from the beginning of European colonial rule to the present, a combination of legal, economic, educational, as well as military and police forces have imposed, promoted and maintained some forms of life, such as the heterosexual, patriarchal family, at the expense of alternative ways of life. A key question for decolonial ethics is how to relate to others in a way that affirms cultural rights in response to these standardising impositions. In this chapter, I argue that Édouard Glissant's framing of an ethical relation as emerging from ‘contacts’ with others, defending the ‘opacity’ of others and ultimately standing in solidarity with others, is more fruitful for decolonial pursuits than Emmanuel Levinas's framing of an ‘encounter’ with a single Other, whose difference is understood in terms of ‘alterity’, and who is ultimately served through reverence. I start from Levinas because the philosophy of liberation, decolonial ethics and decolonial political theology continue to use his vocabulary: difference is framed in terms of alterity, and the ethical relation is exemplified in bearing witness. Calling into question Levinas's ethical vocabulary also shows the limitations of contemporary ethical theory that relies on his terms.

Levinas's concept for difference is ‘alterity’, ‘the radical heterogeneity of the other’ such that this other is ‘absolutely other’. He reserves the term ‘religion’ for the face-to-face ‘ethical relation’, ‘a relation without relation’ in which ‘the encounter with the Other opens the infinite’. He asserts: ‘The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us.’ The Other is a rupture, breaking the possibility for a shared world of relation and communication. The language Levinas uses to describe the ethical relation is not compassion or care, but extreme and hyperbolic terms such as obsession, persecution, trauma and substitution. He insists further that the Other is not different with only ‘a relative alterity’ and in doing so avoids considerations of cultural difference.

Feasibility

So far this study has argued for a shift in the vocabulary of decolonial ethics: from alterity to opacity, from exile to errancy, from root identity to relational identity (‘expansive belonging’), and from hospitality to solidarity – where solidarity allows a reconsideration of politics, as Nitzan Lebovic puts it, ‘not as a binary relation between friend and enemy, but as a network … united against abuse and coercive power’. In arguing for this shift, this study has advanced a politicised sense of responsibility that works to demand opacity against state and market forces as well as to break from familiar identifications, such as one's nation and class. The promise of re-description is that it re-presents ‘responsibility’, suggesting different associations with the term, different ways of hearing it and thinking about it. An alternative understanding leads to aberrant actions. In other words, the promise of our shift in linguistic practices lies in our non-linguistic practices, our bearings of engagement with the world. If this is right, then it would be instructive to elaborate on what makes possible relational politics as well as to describe already ongoing practices that exemplify such relational work. Such an elaboration is the task of this chapter.

Among the francophone Left of his generation, Glissant was famous for saying we must ‘put the poetic back into the heart of the political’. To some this sounds like a superficial aesthetic statement, a fundamental misunderstanding of materialist politics, or perhaps, at best, a call for richer language in slogans and speeches. Even if these were the only ways to hear Glissant's point, it should not be underestimated. As Martin Puchner's scholarship shows, Marx's Manifesto was successful as a political provocation in part because of its reinvention of a genre. Of course, there are other ways to hear Glissant's saying. As Loichot has commented, ‘Poetry, for Glissant, is not just the art of accommodating words in a lyrical mode by the use of sound, rhythm, or metaphorical language.’ ‘Poetry also means “making” in a material way’, she continues: ‘Poétrie, the seeming neologism that Glissant uses in French, evokes simultaneously the poem, inhabited by the English word “poetry”, and the verb pétrir, to knead dough or to give shape to clay.’

Institutions and Imaginaries

In this chapter, in order to build on the political participation I described in Chapters 1 and 2, I consider the deeper demands of solidarity. Participation in coalitional action is necessary but not sufficient for a robust ethics that learns from decolonial movements. My inquiry here is partially inspired by Hannah Arendt's theorisation of ‘the fleeting moment of action’ that characterises a ‘space of appearance’, which ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being’. What is at stake in this inquiry is how an ethical turn could gain a sustained political edge. For this to happen, actors need to maintain political action beyond its initial appearance – not participating in a single march but making political responsibility a larger part of their lives, well beyond the start of the movement. Put differently, participation needs to be more than what Ortega has called ‘political excursions’, meaning ‘a type of politically correct tourism – fleeting moments of experimenting with being political while not really being committed to effecting change’. If we are to think of responsibility in terms of our most central commitments, then we must address the shift from coalitions to communities, from contacts to relations, in Glissant's terms. The oppositional action of demanding a right to opacity is important, but it says little about the ‘meanwhile’ present between connected instances of direct action. ‘[P]olitical resistance often begins in a meanwhile’, novelist and artist John Berger writes. Griffin's concept of ‘secondary duties’ speaks to this meanwhile, as does Lugones's concept of ‘complex communication’. Lugones's starting point – not opposition but communication – introduces a sense of ‘relational identity’ that I will expand on in this chapter. It is in living out a relational identity that one moves from participation to solidarity.

In regard to the question of relational identity, we can immediately raise four concerns. The first is that a focus on the level of the individual and their identity presupposes a neoliberal subject of unlimited growth and change. Yet even when we are discussing how global forces and movements affect cultures, actual interactions always occur on the level of individuals. As the anthropologist Richard Price puts it in an essay on creolisation in the Caribbean, ‘Human beings meet and engage one another; cultures do not. Individuals who claim multiple identities interact with one another; ethnicities do not.’