Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature by Amy T. Hamilton (review)

In Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature, Amy T. Hamilton explores the constellation of walking, land, writing, and the historical and metaphorical implications of leaving human footprints on the "more-than-human" world. Building on the work of feminist and ecofeminist scholars and on her own previous explorations of captivity narratives, border literatures, and Native American women writers, Hamilton situates in historical and literary contexts close readings of American fiction and nonfiction texts, acknowledging the metaphors of movement while keeping her eye trained on the material action of walking. The result is an important examination of what Hamilton calls the "intra-action" between humans and the natural world. Peregrinations is itself a peregrination through American captivity narratives, the Navajo Long Walk, Mary Austin's desert writings, Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway, and Louise Erdrich's North Dakota novels.

Traditionally, scholarship on American mobility has asserted that white men enjoyed the privilege of physical movement while women and people of color emoted but were rather static in more literal kinds of movement (upward mobility, westward mobility, and so on). Studies such as Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her (1984) and Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2005) argue for a broader understanding of women's claim to and movement across the land. Hamilton adds to this scholarship by bringing in the voices and physical experiences of "walkers whose journeys have been ignored or dismissed" (6). This important move acknowledges the agency of women and people of color—particularly Indigenous Americans and Hispanic immigrants—throughout American (literary) history. Hamilton ultimately argues that attention paid to walking as depicted across generic boundaries and lived across historical moments yields a broader "understanding about how meaning is created" and provokes important consideration of how mobility and agency are understood and expressed for noncanoni cal and underrepresented voices (5).

Hamilton's first two chapters compare the walking in captivity narratives with the 1864 Navajo Long Walk during which thousands of Diné Indians were marched from their traditional lands to an internment camp in what would become eastern New Mexico. Hamilton argues that the walking in Mary Rowlandson's and Sarah Wakefield's narratives illustrates both their agency and the complicated relationship their Indigenous captors have with walking and land, namely, that one community's claim to and movement across the land results in the destruction of another. Chapter 2 compellingly argues that forced walking wounds both the land and the people whose feet tread upon it while also building community and resilience. Demonstrating how the captivity narrative's structure mimics the act of walking, Hamilton contends that "walking transcends the bounds of symbolic meaning; in moving bodily across the material land with other material bodies, [walkers] experience to varying degrees a sense of their own intermeshment in the world" (59). Intermeshment lies at the heart of Hamilton's argument: walking is a physical expression of our intra-action with all that is more-than-human.

Chapters 3 and 4, rightly placed in the crux of the book, most clearly articulate the crossroad of walking's physical and metaphorical properties. Through an analysis of the prosody of Austin's desert writings and Urrea's The Devil's Highway, Hamilton illustrates how the act of walking informs authorial craft and serves as a transgressive vehicle for border crossing. Hamilton weaves biography, history, and ecology with literary history and craft to both situate Austin among—and distinguish her from—the American Transcendentalists. Although to some extent this chapter perpetuates the stereotypical association of women and Indigenous people with nature, Hamilton's reading asserts their position of agency and suggests that Austin's attention to the land and Indigenous cultures was connected to her effort to find "a more authentic' American literature" (109). Hamilton's reading of Urrea's account, especially provocative in this political climate, encourages us to read borders, border crossing, and immigration beyond their...