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

by Matthew Beaumont

"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.

Genres: Philosophy

225 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 12, 2024

Reviews

[Emilie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Using the pedestrian as ‘indicator species’, Beaumont echoes Fanon’s utopian picture as one in which all will walk upright. He suggests that there can be no Black flaneur as the object under surveillance cannot also become a dispassionate observer. For Fanon, “the muscles of the colonized are always tensed”. Fanon’s Black subject, Beaumont suggests, is like Benjamin’s Angel of History who is not only thrust “into the future to which his back is turned” but paralysed in the force of this propulsion.

More than anything I appreciated the critique of Fanon’s Algeria Unveiled in which Beaumont notes that Algerian women did not instinctively take to their new unveiled role, their ease of movement simply a gestus. The absence of the veil presents a disruption in the Algerian woman’s “corporal pattern”, forcing her to relearn her body and stage a “new dialectic of the body and the world.” Returning to the veil to conceal explosives, the Algerian woman must once again undergo such a change, acting out a hands-free lightness.

[Leif · Rating 2 out of 5]

A well-researched book, certainly, but I really struggled against it because it feels very laboured. Really, this could have been an essay. In short: Fanon encourages his readers to stand up against colonial violence in an embodied way as well as a metaphorical way. Do we need a critique of mobility to tell us that? Based on this evidence, I would say "no."

There's little here that really adds to the existing body of work on Fanon. Even the chapter on gender is very tentative.

After tackling a couple of the primary texts, I encourage readers interested in Fanon's thought to start with David Macey's excellent biography.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great introduction to Franz Fanon! Will be reading his original material next :)