Worlding

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.