How We Walk
Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Beaumont reminds us that walking is far from a neutral activity. With the help of Frantz Fanon, Beaumont locates freedom at the level of the body; free from the systems of oppression, exploitation, and harassment."
–Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse
How race, class, and politics influence the way we move
You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human body
How We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, who was one of the first people to think about the politics of ‘walking while black’. It also introduces us to the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote that one could discern the truth about a person through their posture and gait. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a sign of personal and social freedom.
Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents a new interpretation of the impact of class and race on our physical and political mobility, raising important questions about the politics of the body.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beaumont (The Walker), a literature professor at University College London, presents a rigorous study of the ways in which "apparently innocent activities of standing and walking" are politicized in colonial societies. Placing the work of political philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) into conversation with other writers and thinkers on race, the body, and space, Beaumont relates how Fanon's experience being ogled on a public street in France by a white mother and child ("Look, a Negro!") precipitated an existential "de-formation" ("My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored"); discusses how Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich influenced Fanon's notion of "combat breathing," in which "the chest of the colonized is at all times strained, tensed... it must be permanently prepared for battle"; and juxtaposes Fanon's early career research into Friedrich's ataxia—an inherited condition with which it's "almost impossible to achieve an upright gait"—with his later work on Black people's " right to mobility" (including the "right to be upright"). Easily translating abstruse philosophical concepts into fluid prose, Beaumont sheds light on the inherent impossibility of existing as a Black body in a colonialized society even as he envisions a "post-capitalist, post-colonial" world in which the racialized body is not transcended but "inhabited as a form of liberation." Assured and erudite, this is well worth a look.
