Hardback
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Forthcoming
+ free ebook
Forthcoming
Forthcoming
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. Frantz 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.
One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of English critics
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.
An uncanny and haunting foreshadowing of our cities as they now appear to us ... familiar subjects are given revelatory new interpretations ... thought-provoking.
Drawing on numerous literary sources, both familiar and obscure, Beaumont takes the reader on a labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking.
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
[A] heady blend of history and theory.
Praise for Nightwalking
Part literary criticism, part social history, part polemic, this is a haunting addition to the canon of psychogeography.