How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body

(Hardback)

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You can tell a lot about someone by the way they walk. As Matthew Beaumont argues, the body holds the social traumas of race, history, and inequality. Our stride reflects our social and political experiences and inequalities, how we navigate, the necessary constant vigilance against city life. Through a series of portraits of major thinkers Beaumont explores the relationship between walking and race, freedom, capitalism, and the human body. Franz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, was one of the first people to think about what happened when 'walking while black'. Beaumont also introduces us to Wilheilm Reich, who wrote that one could tell the truth of a person through their 'gait'. For Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a signal of one's freedom. Such questions raise the dilemma of how a person walks under capitalism Can one ever find peace while putting one foot in front of the other What is the relationship between one's stride and the places where we go Thought-provoking and lyrical, Matthew Beaumont reimagines the canon of the literature on walking and presents a new perspective on the impact of class, race, and politics on our physical movements and raises important questions about the truth behind our stride.

Reviews

Beaumont is one of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics -- Terry Eagleton, author of How to Read Literature
In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Beaumont reminds us that walking is far from a neutral activity; it is, rather, "irreducibly political". 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 Flneuse

Author Bio

Matthew Beaumont is a Professor in the Department of English at University College, London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He is the author of the highly acclaimed Nightwalking, and The Walker.