In Worlding, Kathleen Stewart traces the proliferation of everyday practices, fantasies, and scenes of damage in a new ordinary in the United States from the 1950s to the Trump years. Her poetic prose moves like a flip book across patterns, places, times, strays, troubles, and lines of power, laying down a creative-critical experiment in description, autoethnography, auto-theory, and a new materialism of elements. Writing in fragments overrun with ideas, she proposes a creative-critical practice that branches out rather than synthesizes. Worlding is a series of tryouts approaching the weight, generativity, and politics of the unthought, the cryptic, the visceral, the conventional, the artful, and the elemental. From birds and weather to a face or a harsh phrase, Stewart plays at the boundaries of worlding’s capacities, creatively mulling over the possibilities beyond the edge of experience and speculation.

Kathleen Stewart is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, author of Ordinary Affects, and coauthor of The Hundreds, both published by Duke University Press.