Starred review from January 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.