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.

Matthew Beaumont is the best of all time! Love all his previous books, and this was such an interesting take on Fanon. Studies Fanon with him in class, and am blown away with how he asses the body politic!