Benjamin P. Davis talks to Usha Natarajan about Ben’s book on the inspirational Caribbean poet, Édouard Glissant. What we can learn from Glissant about human rights? What does Glissant mean by the ‘right to opacity’? Is it necessary and possible to know the Other? How do we ‘choose our bearing’ and engage in ethical academic and legal praxis amid neoliberal institutions that are in varying degrees complicit in genocide, famine, violence, and suffering?

TWAILR: Dialogues #20/2025

Usha Natarajan: Thank you, Ben, for this opportunity to discuss your 2023 text, Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics, which draws on Caribbean philosophy to shed light on the pitfalls and potentialities of human rights for anticolonial and anti-imperial work, and which is the prequel to your 2025 book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt.

Choose Your Bearing shares with TWAIL a central concern with praxis and how to ‘choose one’s bearing’ with care despite being in environments that are often inconducive to self-reflexivity. From western neoliberal academia to intergovernmental human rights fora, from domestic lawmakers to the big NGOs, the space for thoughtful and tactical communal politics seems to be diminishing. This book is an important intervention into how to reclaim and refashion such politics to combat the fear, greed, and selfishness unleashed by globalized capitalism.    

Before we get into some of your insights, perhaps you could explain how you came to write this book. Particularly, how did you come to Glissant as the central scholar shaping your inquiry, as well as to Black Studies and Indigenous Studies more generally? I am also curious about how you came to be interested in human rights. From what I understand, and please correct me if I am wrong, your scholarly training is not primarily in international law but rather in philosophy.

Benjamin P. Davis: Thank you for reading my book so carefully, Usha. That is always an honor. For me, it is refreshing simply to have this space for conversation.

And, by the way, I really enjoyed your dialogues on the legacy of Edward Said.

Let me answer your question now. During college I studied in Costa Rica and spent some time in Cuba, and when I came back to the United States, my world no longer really made sense. Why did we buy pre-packaged bread and not know our bakers? Why were we sending our elders to bland and ultimately unaffordable corporate ‘care’ facilities? Why did we put up with such bad coffee? Why was there no poetry in our everyday lives? I had no vocabulary to talk about these questions.

Then I encountered Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. His writing was so damn hard to understand. But I felt like there was such a vision there – a vison for humanity. So I kept reading his work, and Cindy Willett supported my dissertation on Glissant, which was unusual at that time in Emory’s philosophy department, which was known for its intense reading list in the history of Western philosophy.

This dissertation, however, was not very legible to the world of academic philosophy, in which I have never had a job, despite my burning love of Western philosophy – my love of how strange it is. One factor made my job prospects even worse: In college and as I was writing my dissertation and then book on Glissant, I was somewhat involved in struggles for land rights in North Dakota (United States) and in Pernambuco (Brazil). I was also working to preserve what was called the Indian Studies program at the University of North Dakota, and then later I went to Standing Rock, which took me five years to write about.

My publications on Glissant, whom many considered an obscure Caribbean poet (not a philosopher), and my reading him to theorize land rights, got me lots of curious looks in philosophy job interviews. However, Black Studies found my work instantly legible. My two most secure jobs have been in Black Studies, and I have never had my scholarship questioned from the field. Being treated that way has lifted a huge weight from my back.

Why was there no poetry in our everyday lives? I had no vocabulary to talk about these questions. Then I encountered Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.

Usha: You declare early on in this text your commitment to an ethical theory that does not withdraw into carefree abstractions, and your text shares with TWAIL a commitment to cultivating a sense of community and solidarity that is transnational (or at least not state-based). In the course of your explorations, we encounter several social movements for change. For instance, you engage with liberation theology. Can you explain what you mean when you say that ‘this book can be read as dwelling with what ethical theory could become when it is inflected by protest and prayer’ (p 19)?

Ben: Can I qualify my answer here and say something to begin? I have lived most of my life in the Global North, in the first world, to use TWAIL language. In Choose Your Bearing and in all of my writing, I try to follow Glissant’s critique of elites and work on being a reflexive scholar. I’m not telling people how to get by.

That said, I was very drawn to liberation theology when I was living in Latin America – in particular to Gustavo Gutiérrez’s claim that orienting oneself to God involves breaking with one’s mental categories and with one’s class status.

In Choose Your Bearing, I wanted to draw attention to the role of prayer in Caribbean philosophy. Aimé Césaire in his ‘robust prayer’ [ma prière virile] says ‘make of me a man of closure / make of me a man of beginning / make of me a man of reaping / but also make of me a man of sowing’; and Frantz Fanon in his ‘final prayer’ says ‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’¹ I had read about prayer in these authors and seen prayer all around me in working for Indigenous rights. Prayer was part of orienting ourselves to land and to each other. But where was it in scholarship on human rights?

I also wanted to shift how protest is understood. We were called terrorists, criminals, and all sorts of names at Standing Rock – the same would be true about Black Lives Matter, as well as for protests all over the world. I have spoken to some respectable people who seem to assume we went to Standing Rock out of a Leftist desire to make trouble. I was trying to correct that assumption; many people went out of a deeply felt need to pray across traditions and races.

After all, how often does it happen in our world today that Muslims and Jews and Christians and Baha’is and atheists and people of other traditions – whatever your skin looks like, whomever you sleep with or love – sit down together and eat and pray? That was what was happening at Standing Rock, led by the women elders of the camps. My sense is that many of us are still chasing that feeling, which a political community brought about. It may have been the closest thing to unalienated life we have experienced.

Orienting oneself to God involves breaking with one’s mental categories and with one’s class status … Prayer was part of orienting ourselves to land and to each other. But where was it in scholarship on human rights?

Usha: With regard to human rights, you characterize approaches to human rights as falling broadly into three categories: the paradigmatic approach, the critical approach, and the organizational approach. Could you please explain what these three approaches to human rights are? While some TWAILers are unwavering in their critique of human rights (I confess that I am one of them), most within the TWAIL movement share with you an organizational approach to human rights. Your reasoning for adopting the organizational approach is nuanced and tactical; could you please elaborate?

Ben: I appreciate the critiques of human rights; I take them very seriously in the book.

I read the chapter you linked to, and I really liked your observation that ‘[t]he relentless stream of commodities unleashed on us by the market do not adequately satiate us, yet the thought of losing our right to possess is unbearable’. As we watch ‘our desires denigrating into needs and enslaving us’, you go on, we can say that property is better understood not as a legal entitlement but as ‘an addiction’.² You and I agree on that; and more accurately, your striking description helps me understand property relations better. Thank you for that.

Where we differ is how we read the potential and the addressee of human rights claims. You note that thinking of ourselves as rights-bearing subjects creates ‘a world of circumscribed atomistic individuals where each of us becomes more withdrawn within ourselves’,³ arguing further that ‘human rights distract from and contribute to the root causes of social suffering and environmental harm, forming part of the legal structure of capitalism’.⁴

I am sympathetic to this critique, which you share with one of my philosophical guides, Simone Weil, who said rights claims offer a ‘commercial flavor’ of exchange, not a sense of justice.

So why do I still find rights claims useful?

In Choose Your Bearing, I offer a typology of approaches to human rights based on the orientation of the rights claims in each approach. When the orientation is to the state, I describe it as ‘the paradigmatic approach’. When the orientation is toward scholars and readers trying to argue against using rights claims, I describe it as ‘the critical approach’. When the orientation is toward ordinary actors trying to use rights claims to build solidarity, I describe it as ‘the organizational approach’.

What happened was, when I was working with communities for ‘land back’ – the summary term for repatriating Indigenous land and re-gaining native title – I heard claims to human rights (and humanity) all the time. Rights claims were an important tool in the struggle, whether at the headwaters of the Mississippi River, taken-back forest land in Brazil, or in a Church basement in Minnesota. Then I would go to academic conferences in four-star hotels, and scholars wearing all black and fancy glasses, scholars who write in a very obscure way – perhaps the same scholars whose writing has been so esoteric that it has thus avoided commentary on Palestine when it has mattered most – these authors would cite Adorno or early Foucault and say that human rights are a trap, particularly because they entangle us further within state capture.

But activists were very aware of that possibility, and appealing to the state was not how I had seen rights claims being used next to the rivers. So I sided with the theory from below as I saw it in a few contexts (I am not saying this is true in all contexts), and I kept my faith in human rights as a way to connect struggles, as a way to talk to each other from Standing Rock to Palestine to Puerto Rico to Haiti. Thought this way, human rights are not really about policy changes; they are about finding a language that offers a starting point to connect and deepen struggles across the widest possible publics.

I got this sense of what human rights are from Edward Said, who has a line I used as the epigraph for Choose Your Bearing. Said says: ‘To be “for” human rights means, in effect, to be willing to venture interpretations of those rights in the same place and with the same language employed by the dominant power, to dispute its hierarchy and methods, to elucidate what it has hidden, to pronounce what it has silenced or rendered unpronounceable. These intellectual procedures require, above all, an acute sense not of how things are separated but of how they are connected, mixed, involved, embroiled, linked.’ ⁵

Human rights are not really about policy changes; they are about finding a language that offers a starting point to connect and deepen struggles across the widest possible publics.

Usha: Your work takes seriously Caribbean philosophy as a site of theory, epistemology, and conceptual creation. You draw on a diverse range of critical scholarship from the Caribbean and beyond. In these last few questions, I want to focus on two key concepts that frame your study: Glissant’s call to ‘choose your bearing’ and his demand of ‘the right to opacity’. Beginning with the latter, could you please explain what Glissant means when he demands the right to opacity?

Ben: If only Glissant had elaborated more on this!

I have tracked Glissant’s uses of the right to opacity across his work in an essay at Critical Legal Thinking. Glissant says all kinds of different things about opacity, including that the right to opacity can be a ceremony. I love that idea.

My argument in Choose Your Bearing is that if rights always contain corresponding duties, then the right to opacity implies a duty for elite and majority citizens to respect and defend minority rights not only in law (politics) but also through how they live (ethics).

Once I was interviewing for a job, and the legal scholar Adrienne Davis – who, by the way, has a luminous sense of humor – suggested that I could read Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’ as a term to summarize historical struggles for rights to culture and land. At that point, I had thought of reading ‘the right to opacity’ to make sense of present struggles, but I hadn’t thought of reading it back into history. Here again it was scholars whose expertise lie with critical race theory and Black Studies who most helped me and carried forward my project.

I could read Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’ as a term to summarize historical struggles for rights to culture and land.

Usha: The ‘right to opacity’ is intelligently crafted, with Glissant employing the notion of ‘right’ in an unusual, radical, and profoundly destabilizing way; not only asserting the unknowability of the Other but disavowing any need for comprehension and recognition. As such, the right to opacity is particularly pertinent when resisting settler colonialism – whether for Indigenous and Tribal sovereignty or for Palestine where state recognition has come to the forefront in recent weeks – to topple the political importance given to recognition as a criterion for statehood. You discuss how Fanon and Coulthard critique state-based recognition, and your own deep skepticism of state-based solutions emerges clearly throughout this book. In contrast with the politics of recognition in international law, how could the right to opacity be useful in contemporary struggles in the settler colonial context and beyond?

Ben: I am glad you asked your question this way, because maybe here we read the right to opacity slightly differently. It is very clear in Glissant’s writing that he poses opacity against comprehension, the grasping form of knowing/relating to others. But does this mean opacity is against knowledge or recognition per se?

On my reading, there is still room for some recognition here. And there is additionally room for knowability, just of a kind different from comprehension. I believe there are ways to know others while still allowing for their mystery. Doesn’t politics teach us this? After all, we need some familiarity with, or knowledge of, the needs and requests of others (not a capital-O Other) in order to respond to their requests and stand in solidarity with them. We recognize the legitimacy of these needs. We act on them in turn. This is what I mean by ‘choose your bearing’. I can give some examples.

For one, the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani argued for what activists in streets all over the world have been talking about in the chant that ends, ‘we are all Palestinians’. Kanafani had a sense that Palestine is a cause for everyone interested in revolution. Does this legibility and universality contradict a right to opacity? I don’t think so. The right to opacity, as I read it, is a request to be engaged as a human and a refusal to be treated like a math problem that can be comprehended and solved. It is not a denial of relationality; it is an invitation to true relationality, which involves some knowledge and recognition.

For another, in Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, Archipelago books took the unusual step of including a blurb from the author himself. On the back of my paperback copy are lines from Elias Khoury reading: ‘The most important thing is to investigate the human experience. This is why a reader from anywhere in the world can identify with the novel. Forget that it’s set in Palestine because it is a story about the human dream and how people can survive catastrophe. Our duty as writers, intellectuals and citizens of the world is to try and find our way out of this madness.’

So the question becomes: Is there space for a disposition, a bearing, in the spirit Khoury’s investigation of the human experience, that does not slip into the colonizing drive for comprehension and control that Glissant worries about?

I think so.

I read these authors as calling for a very specific way to gain knowledge about a place and a people. Again, here I draw from Said’s prescriptions in Culture and Imperialism and in so much of his late work: To learn the history of different peoples. To see that history repeating itself. To see ourselves in that repetition. To see possibility in spaces written off. To make connections and not just blame far-off governments but also to turn a critical eye to one’s own country. To work against prejudice, above all our own. For me, these acts are consistent with an ethics of opacity.

This does not mean calling myself an expert on the question of Palestine. It is not about academic specialization but about what it means to be alive today. It might mean going to a march outside of a weapons plant, calling my congressperson, quitting investing in certain companies and banks, and reading the scholarship, novels, and essays, as well as listening to the music, of Palestinians. These acts take on heightened importance if Palestinians have asked me to conduct myself this way and to read these works, which they have.

So now I’m trying to think through the question of Palestine with what Said called in a radio lecture ‘the idea of Palestine’, which means thinking about the struggle for land rights and the right of return in Palestine in relation to a democratic politics and a humanistic ethics across (and in) the world. The idea of Palestine invites us to make connections in our scholarship. For instance, the Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke says that in the US, we can’t talk about Israel because we are Israel.

That’s how I see the right to opacity as useful today. It’s not only about the rights claim. It’s about understanding the ethical demand underlying it; it’s about reading the rights claim as a request. Glissant calls this spirit capital-R Relation. So for me it’s not about the unknowability of the (absolute) Other but knowledge, writing, and action in Relation. This is to prioritize politics.

I believe there are ways to know others while still allowing for their mystery … it’s not about the unknowability of the (absolute) Other but knowledge, writing, and action in Relation.

UN: Your book’s title is drawn from Glissant’s call that ‘you must choose your bearing’ [Il faut choisir l’allure]. You observe that ‘some spend their days hunched over sewing machines while others continually update their wardrobes’ (p 1). Nowadays, I find myself pondering the obsession with anti-obesity medications in North America whilst people in Haiti, Mali, Palestine, and Sudan starve to death. To live an ethical life in such a world is something that TWAILers grapple with daily. International law is an elite profession where experts are ‘designated to speak to the colonized and other marginalized peoples about the rights that they possess’ to quote Maldonado-Torres (p 7). Glissant challenges us not only to acknowledge our complicity in the postcolonial predicament but to change our stance politically and personally.

As Patricia Monture says in the context of Indigenous sovereignty and the Canadian state, ‘I do not doubt that the release of power is a difficult thing’ (p 110). But such difficulty is a crucial part of privileged subjects pursuing an ethical life. TWAILers, especially those living and working in the Global North, are deeply implicated subjects and answering Glissant’s call necessarily entails courage and sacrifice. You quote Joy James on kinship – ‘kinship is determined by the willingness of its members to share the same body, that is, to suffer its common vulnerabilities and victories as the moving target of colonial and racist repression’ – and you say that ‘making kin sees through the connections of the settler family and of elite advocacy that never suffers common vulnerabilities’ (p 175). What does Glissant’s call to ‘choose your bearing’ mean to you and why did you choose it for your title?

Ben: Here I really appreciate your critical reflections on your own field. And yeah, the starvation while we in the US pump ourselves with Ozempic – that’s really something.

Amidst multiple genocides and starvations linked to war and anthropogenic climate change, elites from all over the world continue to pursue a form of life that is suicidal for our species; and many people aspire to this status as well. Ethnoclass desire, to use Sylvia Wynter’s term, is killing our species, though this death is doled out at differential paces.

I have seen how rights claims function in two ways at once: They can make an ethical request on elites to live differently, and they can do the political work of connecting struggles to build power if and when those ethical demands are denied.

Ultimately, by selecting Glissant’s call to ‘choose your bearing’ – which refers to refusing state power when he uses it in Poetics of Relation – I wanted to highlight the existentialist dimension of ethics: Our choices build a certain kind of world. The little choices – whether or not we defend academic freedom at our universities and law schools, whether or not we speak and write about Palestine and Haiti and land back publicly, whether or not we invest in oil and weapons companies as our universities do in their endowments – add up to something much larger than ourselves, namely, this system we often feel caught in and that often feels outside us. But it is us; the system is a result of our actions.

In other words, I wanted to locate political responsibility within ordinary actors – within me and within you. This could be read as blaming ourselves, but it could also be a way of highlighting our agency. Making choices to stand in solidarity – choices that are often read as mad, as crazy in societies that normalize violence – could be a way out of this madness. That is my prayer.

The question that remains for me is whether lawyers and theorists, often at the expense of our scholarly careers, will also return to some of the normative work of international law – not just in regard to policy, but by outlining new forms of life, in the most widely accessible ways, based on the vision of poets such as Glissant.

I would love to read more of that research, and I hope our readers who are doing this work will send it to me.

Making choices to stand in solidarity – choices that are often read as mad, as crazy in societies that normalize violence – could be a way out of this madness.

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1. See Aimé Césaire, Journal of a Homecoming/Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, trans. N. Gregson Davis (Duke University Press, 2017) 128-129; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks/Peau noire, masques blancs, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Pluto Press, 2008) 181.
2. Usha Natarajan, ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ in Usha Natarajan & Julia Dehm (eds.), Locating Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) 200, at 210.
3. Ibid, 214.
4. Ibid, 215.
5. Edward Said, ‘Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2002) 430.