How We Walk Av Matthew Beaumont

How race, class and politics influence the ways we moveYou can tell a lot about someone by the way they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of race, history, and inequality. Our posture and gait reflects our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers the 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 tell the truth of a person through their ''gait''. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a signal of one''s freedom.Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents a new perspective on the impact of class and race on our physical and political mobility, raises important questions about the truth about the politics of the body.