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.