Benjamin P. Davis, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from du Bois to Arendt – Edinburgh University Press, May 2025

update October 2025 – now in paperback

Offers a new reading of humanity in decolonial theory

• Articulates an original humanism informed by decolonial and post-colonial theory
• Advances an ethical theory across Black Studies, Caribbean philosophy, and Continental philosophy
• Defends the concepts of ‘the human’ and ‘humanity’
• Outlines a more constructive critical theory in our hyper-critical moment

Is there a way of being human that could invite people away from today’s models of violence and consumerism? Looking forward to a new, increasingly creolized century, in 1997 the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant asked, ‘Do we have the right and the means to live another dimension of humanity? But how?’

Building on the defense of human rights he outlined in Choose Your Bearing, Benjamin P. Davis traces figures of ‘the human’ and ‘humanity’ in W. E. B. Du Bois, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said. He concludes with a reflection on Hannah Arendt’s post-war correspondence with Karl Jaspers, which offers lessons for a new humanism as we witness ongoing wars today.