6. Footprint: Four Itineraries

Footprint: Four Itineraries

by Radhika Subramaniam

5.5 x 8.5, 100 pgs., $18

Forthcoming in 2025.

Part of the series Essays in the Critical Humanities

"This amazing and original book is something of a global/time travel walking tour with anti-colonialism, land rights, and activist art among its many subtexts. Each 'itinerary' follows trails and maps into another unbeaten track, another unfamiliar corner of our world. From impressions on the earth to human anatomy to empathetic micro histories ranging from Cinderella and Winnie the Pooh to the shoe industry, urban sidewalks, war, and ICE (to mention only a few), Radhika Subramaniam’s impressive scholarship and lovely writing asks in so many ways 'What’s the next step?'"

—Lucy R. Lippard

"A transdisciplinary gazetteer traversing histories of labor and cultural memory, violence and physical persistence, Footprint invites us to track this seemingly simple trace all over the world, time out of mind—from the ground at Laetoli, 3.66 million years ago, near the Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania, to the edge of the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, in 1969, and on to the landscape of carbon expenditure in the Anthropocene. We have been here—and there, and there—and, like Crusoe, met ourselves coming and going, as a feared and longed-for other. The human footprint, writes Subramaniam, is 'not an inert carrier; it is an elemental encounter.' Her book stages that encounter, delicately and indelibly."

—Frances Richard, Senior Editor, Places Journal

"Footprint puts the politics back into walking, linking it to a poetics of marking. In a wonderful array of examples drawn from colonial Mexico to post-riot Brixton, from Hopi philosophy to the decipherment (and reburial) of ancient tracks from the Willandra Lakes, Subramaniam shows how footing, as mobile cartography, as resistance to tarmac, as path-making, as the refusal of all kinds of standardisation, rethinks the foundations of co-existence. Just as no foot walks alone, we track ourselves (as others track us): in her dazzlingly diverse and pedagogically irresistible stories, footprints are the measure of migration. Owning movement, they put the choreography back into geography. And the ethics. A brilliant essay in eco-poetics, engagingly therapeutic for a culture whose sedentarism has left feet dragging behind."

—Paul Carter, author of The Road to Botany Bay and Professor of Design (Urbanism), RMIT University, Melbourne

"Footprint: Four Itineraries is a guidepost to a world alive with the tactile matterings of elemental encounters. An opening into the endless tales of footprints that surface on sidewalks, deserts, and the moon. Footprints here are worldly stories on a constellation of paths. Leaden, light, persistent, dreamy, and differently infused, they are waylaid by war, or they manifest, in their way, the cruel greed of imperialism or the curiosity of a world walked. Ordinary, ubiquitous and oddly self-evident, footprints are at once palpable and buoyant, carrying the pleasures and fears of what was left behind and what propelled people or elephants into the promise of different horizons. Ephemeral, they cede ground to what comes after. Subramaniam’s beautiful and brilliant work is itself an enigmatic imprint made of words and images that call out impacts, dwell in a temporality, follow a footprint’s humble claim. The book is not about footprints but travels with them across histories, technologies, and affects. Asking if it is yet possible to tread lightly on our world, Subramaniam moves alongside artists and cartographers and feet into the glitchy heart of the real, performing the weight of a world riven with the horror and generativity of ambition and still standing.

—Kathleen Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects and Professor Emerita, University of Texas, Austin.

"Footprint: Four Itineraries is a fascinating untangling of the metaphors and meanings accrued around the marks made by feet. From colonial mapping to border guard tracking, the first steps on the moon to inclusive prosthetics, the Kartini Kendeng cement protests in Indonesia to Mona Hatoum’s performance art, the book moves through time, around the world, and into space, arguing for the liveliness and the mobility of the footprint (and the vitality of human-scale motion)."

—Clare Qualmann, Associate Professor, University of East London and Co-Founder, Walking Artists Network

"Intellectually omnivorous and playful, Footprint invites the reader to explore the footprint as material artifact and as a site for the production of meanings: from Robinson Crusoe's shock encountering a single footprint on his island, to the dusty impressions left by the first astronauts on the moon, to Aboriginal trackers who were employed to hunt down fugitive white convicts in early 19th century Australia.

—Charles Zerner, Cohn Professor of Environmental Studies Emeritus, Sarah Lawrence College

Footprint: Four Itineraries takes the footprint for a walk—to the Himalayas, the American southwest, to Arnhem Land and the moon, through monuments, prehistoric sites, sidewalks, and paintings, alongside artists, cartographers, surveyors and trackers, hesitating at revolutionary debate and solitary reverie, waylaid by war and land claims, sniffing greed and curiosity, recognizing both falter and fit, moving stealthily and boldly—to test the lasting power of this very material metaphor.

The book probes the long history of the footprint’s manifestation in the human imagination. It has signified mobility and occupation, inquiry and imperialism, absence and presence, trace, and impact. As a metaphor, it is ubiquitous and oddly self-evident. The book’s four itineraries trace the contradictory forensic evidence offered by the footprint’s many appearances. How can that dreamy print of your sole in the sand also signify that the planet is dying? When did a lithe mobile residue become a leaden artifact? Stories of footprints testify to colonialism, imperialism, and suppression but woven through them are histories of desire, persistence, mobility, and of lightness. In taking you on a series of journeys to understand why and what it means for our future, Footprint: Four Itineraries asks if it is yet possible to tread lightly on our world.

Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York City. With an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban life, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships.