Peregrinations

“Peregrinations revises dated notions of walking in American literature as something associated largely with 19th century Euroamerican male-authored nonfiction. With material ecocriticism and feminism as backbone of her methodological approach, Hamilton intricately explores walking as it functions in Native American, Chicanx, and Euroamerican literatures. She reveals the reasons why walking should be understood as a process of bodies (human and nonhuman) moving not only across terrain, but through cross-currents of air, all the while impacting earth, and forming trails and paths that continue to be important both geographically and literarily in North America today. This incisive, beautifully-written book will be considered crucial to a growing and urgently important scholarship in American literary and material ecocritical studies.”
—Joni Adamson, professor of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative, Arizona State University

"Far from a crusade against whiteness and manliness, whatever those things are, Hamilton’s work brings to light the universality of walking as a deeply human experience and elevates underrepresented narratives to the level of the John-Smith-Davy-Crockett-Lewis-and-Clark American love affair. In an age of rocket ships, bullet trains, and nuclear submarines, it’s worth remembering that walking is the foundation of all our advancements."
—Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment

"An important examination of what Hamilton calls the ‘intra- action’ between humans and the natural world. … In walking alongside the underrepresented voices in American literature, Hamilton’s Peregrinations invites us to read the many footprints storying the American landscape."
—Western American Literature

"Hamilton shows how walking is the very basis of human agency. Though she briefly mentions Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau’s noted ideas on walking, Hamilton deconstructs the notion that walking is merely “a masculine tradition of conquest and domination of the American land,” by spotlighting several examples of Native American and Southwest border literatures that use walking as a means to interrogate place and identity."
—KCET, Public Media Group of Southern California