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

For those of us who were taught that the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson did the only literarily significant walking, Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature provides an essential correction to an ostensible truism. No longer can we assume that, as Amy T. Hamilton puts it in this monograph, "intrepid American male walking" (10) fully comprises the cultural significance of those who took the intellectual measure of the terrain according to the rhythm of their footsteps. She invites us into a world of walkers who traversed the American landscape with other purposes than a Euroamerican white male tradition of conquest, domination, and quests of self-definition (9). Instead, we meet Euroamerican women and Chicanx, Diné (Navajo), and Anishinaabe writers whose peregrinations were revelations of the "complex intermeshment of human interpretive systems, human bodies, and more-than-human nature" (24). Ultimately, Hamilton shows us how to read for the kinship praxes that span and largely define the various archives of ambulatory Americana.

In other words, only a small subset of writer-walkers approached their subject with such a degree of solipsism that they only saw themselves and their national or imperial projects reflected back as they trod the pathways of their surroundings. This intervention into the study of American nature writing proves valuable precisely because it opens up a larger field of inquiry. Once we realize that intrepid American male walking accounts for only a minor dimension of how writers theorized themselves, place, and purpose through movement, it becomes clear how little we know about what must be a "much longer and much richer story in the Americas than this masculine narrative allows" (11-12).

Hamilton addresses this gap by assembling a set of case studies across five chapters that span American writing about walking from colonial captivity narratives to present day border crossings. Readers of Peregrinations will find authors with whom they are likely familiar: Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Wakefield, Mary Austin, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Louise Erdrich. What's new about her approach to their texts is how she locates in them a shared aesthetic that can be understood as a "dynamic interlacing of human experience and discursive practices with the material agency of nonhuman nature" (15)—an aesthetic that complements and enhances their importance in the context of other possible traditions in which we might position them separately. United by their willingness to be ensnared by the land they traversed as much as they sought to capture it in words, these writers mark out the much broader dimensions of a literary tradition from which, at best, they were excluded and, at worst, was assumed not to exist at all.

Peregrinations argues that "what walking means arises not simply out of a human investment or interpretation, but out of the very act of walking itself, both the physical experience of the walker and the relationship between the walker and the more-than-human world they walk" (6). Hamilton's emphasis on the critical necessity of accounting for the relationship between perambulator and path is well taken. Isn't this issue the precise problem with using intrepid American male walking as the conceptual frame for parsing the meaning of movement? It is not just that Euroamerican men weren't the only ones doing interesting walking across the annals of literary history. It is also the fact that, as interpretive guides, they do little to account for the complexities and diversity of relationships in which one might find oneself with the land—particularly because their narratives lack self-awareness of how political agendas precipitated undesired, unending movement in others. Chapters on the Navajo Long Walk, Urrea, and Erdrich elaborate how political and economic contexts make certain subjects into unwilling walkers who are then shaped by the terrains they traverse. Removal policies, policing of national borders, and the lasting impact of colonialism precipitate perpetual motion in certain peoples. The results are literatures that, for example, record "the...