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

by Matthew Beaumont

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781804290071
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	03/12/2024
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,063,158
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Matthew Beaumont, a Professor of English Literature at University College London, is the author of several books for Verso, including Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015), The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020) and How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body (forthcoming, 2024). He is also the author of Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night (2021). For Verso, he has co-authored The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009) and co-edited Restless Cities (2010).

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Body Arrested
1. The Racialized Body: Fanon Walks with Garnette Cadogan
2. The Exploited Body: Fanon Walks with Ernst Bloch
3. The Disordered Body: Fanon Walks with Nikolaus Friedreich
4. The Paralysed Body: Fanon Walks with Peter Moss
5. The Armoured Body: Fanon Walks with Wilhelm Reich
6. The Body Transformed: Fanon Walks with Assia Djebar

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/15/2024

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"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 Flâneuse

"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 ... Assured and erudite, this is well worth a look."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Publisher