Overview

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.

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9781804290071

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Reviews

One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics -- Terry Eagleton, author of <i>How to Read Literature</i>

"Beaumont is one of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics -- Terry Eagleton, author of <i>How to Read Literature</i> 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 <i>Flâneuse</i>"

"Beaumont is one of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics -- Terry Eagleton, author of <i>How to Read Literature</i> 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 <i>Flâneuse</i> 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 * A necessary reminder of the depth and relevancy of Fanon's political thought and philosophy. -- Sudip Bhattacharya * Counterpunch *"

One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics -- Terry Eagleton, author of <i>How to Read Literature</i> Praise for The Walker * : * Matthew Beaumont's prose is the golden thread of elegance and erudition we need to guide us through the labyrinth of the modern city. These essays confirm him to be simultaneously the possessor of a coherent and convincing overview of emergent Modernist thought and creativity in the urban context, and the inheritor of all the radical subjectivities he engages with. -- Will Self An uncanny and haunting foreshadowing of our cities as they now appear to us ... familiar subjects are given revelatory new interpretations ... thought-provoking. -- Margaret Drabble * TLS * Drawing on numerous literary sources, both familiar and obscure, Beaumont takes the reader on a labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking. -- Sean O'Hagan * The Observer * An erudite book that moves at a pace alternating between brisk and leisurely ... Like his prose, Beaumont's mind is anything but pedestrian. He is as attuned to matters of medicine and science, anthropology, economics, philosophy and psychology as he is to literature and the visual arts -- Willard Spiegelman * Wall Street Journal * [A] heady blend of history and theory. * The New Yorker * Praise for Nightwalking * : * Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography. * Financial Times *

Author Information

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.

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