Benjamin P. Davis
I am an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies & Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University.
I am the author of _Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt_ (Edinburgh UP, 2025), _Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics_ (Edinburgh UP, 2023), and _Simone Weil's Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). With Kris F. Sealey, I co-edited the volume _Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, in the series Creolizing the Canon).
Du Bois and Arendt book:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-another-humanity.html
Glissant book: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-choose-your-bearing.html
Weil book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171943/Simone-Weil%E2%80%99s-Political-Philosophy-Field-Notes-from-the-Margins
Critical Theory book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538188019/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
I am the author of _Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt_ (Edinburgh UP, 2025), _Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics_ (Edinburgh UP, 2023), and _Simone Weil's Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). With Kris F. Sealey, I co-edited the volume _Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, in the series Creolizing the Canon).
Du Bois and Arendt book:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-another-humanity.html
Glissant book: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-choose-your-bearing.html
Weil book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171943/Simone-Weil%E2%80%99s-Political-Philosophy-Field-Notes-from-the-Margins
Critical Theory book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538188019/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
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Books by Benjamin P. Davis
–Paul Gilroy, University of London
In a concentrated attitude of modesty, reflexiveness, and provocation, Another Humanity offers a searching practice of redressive criticism animated by the historical wrong of colonial dispossession. Reading the “human” through Du Bois, Glissant, Wynter, Said, and Arendt, Benjamin Davis encourages us to see the problem of “humanity” as the inescapable core of an alternative contemporary politics.
–David Scott, Columbia University
In Another Humanity, Benjamin P. Davis unpacks the outline of an unfolding crescendo of critical thinking to locate our fragile humanity on a more leveled ground. Like a defiant Sisyphus, at a time when Americans have elected a president who defies every single sense of human decency, Davis insists on righting the wrong, rolling the boulder up the hill.
–Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University
Another Humanity is a brilliant book—its brilliance lies in its humility. Rather than creating new concepts out of thin air, it engages with existing ideas, traces their entanglement in histories of asymmetrical power, and revitalizes them as tools and lenses for imagining and realizing a decolonial future. Davis’s book successfully experiments with a different political and ethical attitude toward theory and the world—and it invites us to do the same.
–Massimiliano Tomba, University of California, Santa Cruz
Intro: https://benjaminpdavis.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/another-humanity-davis-intro.pdf
Order: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Another-Humanity-by-Benjamin-P-Davis/9781399548588
Edinburgh UP Interview: https://euppublishingblog.com/2025/05/05/decolonizing-the-human/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=decolonizing-the-human
—Joy James, Williams College
Davis’ book rigorously argues for a sense of political commitment based on the responsibilities that come with the inescapable and future entanglements of subjects and communities who are always implicated and global. Choose Your Bearing provides us with a compelling guide for thinking and acting ethically in the contemporary world.
—Gerard Laurence Aching, Cornell University
In this ethically bracing and philosophically wide-ranging intervention, Benjamin Davis calls on Édouard Glissant to help reimagine human rights for a politics that requires more awareness of and responsibility for global hierarchy and oppression. Human rights are not beyond reproach but they are also not unsalvageable, if they are reforged as credible tools for emancipation, as Glissant and others have foreseen.
—Samuel Moyn, Yale University
This careful study sheds light on a neglected figure, Glissant, even as it argues persuasively for the ongoing, complicated relevance of human rights discourse in contemporary politics. An important addition to political theory, at once invigorating and enlightening, especially as it confronts racial and cultural difference.
—Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto
Intro: https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/choose-your-bearing-edouard-glissant-human-rights-and-decolonial-ethics/
Order: https://www.bookculture.com/book/9781399522441
American Philosophical Association Interview: https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/08/11/recently-published-book-spotlight-choose-your-bearing/
—Christy Wampole, Princeton University
This book made me understand Simone Weil in a thrilling new way. With clear exposition and forceful argumentation, engaging with Weil texts that are familiar and those that are often overlooked, Benjamin Davis succeeds in inserting Weil into the canon of outstanding twentieth-century political philosophers.
—Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University
In his beautifully written and assiduously detailed book, Davis considers Simone Weil's politics of community, of self, and of thought. Approaching Weil as a sophisticated political philosopher, Davis illuminates an entirely new dimension of Simone Weil's engagement with the turbulence of her time. He does so with all the grace and attention one could desire, and provides an irrefutable argument as to why we should all be reading Simone Weil with Davis as our guide.
—Helen M. Kinsella, University of Minnesota
Too many of Simone Weil’s readers have accepted some version of Charles de Gaulle’s condescending verdict: ‘she’s crazy’. In this powerful and thoughtful study, Benjamin Davis treats Weil as a philosopher who tested her ideas in the factories, high schools, and battlefields of world capitalism and the French Empire. In doing so, he offers a strikingly original portrait of a thinker whose commitment to unifying thought and action offers much to anyone who hopes to understand capitalism and empire today.
—Jessica Whyte, University of New South Wales
Order: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/simone-weils-political-philosophy-9798881863968/
American Philosophical Association Interview: https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/10/27/recently-published-book-spotlight-simone-weils-political-philosophy/
Edited Volume by Benjamin P. Davis
—Hortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Critical theory is in constant need of self-transformation in light of the crises and struggles of its age, an age that is defined by the historical entwinement of capitalism and colonialism and its afterlives. Against this background, Creolizing Critical Theory offers a highly topical invitation to think with the Caribbean, with Caribbean thought as critical theory. Its chapters weave a rich and complex tapestry, containing a multitude of greatly relevant insights for all those who share critical theory’s ambition to address the deep crises of our present and to open up new ways of imagining the future.
—Robin Celikates, University of Amsterdam
Order: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187999/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
Articles by Benjamin P. Davis
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/pga/content/pga_2025_0999_1_22_75
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/pga/content/pga_2023_0999_6_15_42
The aim of the article is to dwell with to what extent rights discourse could be a transitional language around changing practices of sovereignty, title, treaties, and law in the Americas.
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/arendtstudies/content/arendtstudies_2022_0999_8_24_48
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802487
Link: https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jhuman/huab008/6280176?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2021.25
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17570638.2021.2002644?src=
Link: https://brill.com/view/journals/copr/18/1/article-p72_72.xml
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801
Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dj1b25s
Link: http://ijp.tamu.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Responsibilities-of-the-Intellectual-Dewey-Dussel-and-Democracy.pdf
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/clrjames/content/clrjames_2019_0999_12_17_63
Link: https://williamjamesstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/V15N02-A02-Davis-PragmaticInterrupt.pdf
Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xt7p9n6
Link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/
Link: http://www.jcrt.org/archives/16.3/Davis.pdf