Textiles are ubiquitous. From the cradle to the grave, we are wrapped in their folds. Many confuse this material’s pervasiveness with benign comfort, and ignore the menacing circumstances that attend cloth’s boundless presence in our lives. Looming Violence corrects this. It examines why we stake our deepest senses of safety in the comfort of textiles, and how textiles correspondingly serve as all-too-convenient mediums for feelings of discomfort and insecurity—feelings that are persistently used to embolden far-right politics and rewrite the limits of ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’ forms of violence. Centered around a set of highly politicized materials, which punctuate a wide array of military and governmental procedures, political protests, and arts and design practices, Looming Violence theorizes how the orders of touch and the customs of making, exchange, and care endemic to textiles have become synonymous with how we shape the needs, desires, actions, and ideas that bind some of us together, while tearing others apart.

Currently under contract with Manchester University Press.