Playing it Cool, or when Experience Meets Creativity: ‘An Aesthetics of the Cool’ in Life Writings by Olaudah Equiano and Zora Neale Hurston

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Acknowledgments V
3. Contents VII
4. Introduction: Life Narratives, Creativity, and the Social in the Americas 1
5. Part I: Life Narratives
6. Audre Lorde and Jack Kerouac in Mexico and the Creation of Transnational Life Writing 23
7. Prismatic Life Writing: Drawing the Schwarzwald in Desierto de los Leones. The German American Artist, Designer, and Teacher Winold Reiss in Mexico 35
8. The Makeover Genre, Life Writing, Men, and Masculinities 69
9. Part II: Creativity
10. Playing it Cool, or when Experience Meets Creativity: ‘An Aesthetics of the Cool’ in Life Writings by Olaudah Equiano and Zora Neale Hurston 95
11. Black Narrative Self-Making in a Changing Scene: The Life and Adventures of James Beckwourth as Western Borderlands Autobiography 113
12. Bridging Worlds: Individual and Collective Reflections 129
13. Lonely Descriptions of Art and Life: Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (2016) 145
14. Part III: The Social
15. Womanist Awakenings in the Multicultural North: How Fatuma Adar’s and Méshama Eyob-Austin’s Life Writings Represent Black Girlhood in Canada 163
16. Exposing Sexual Abuse among the Amish and Seeking Social Change: Misty Griffin’s Tears of the Silenced 183
17. Biomediality in the Andes: Life Writing and Disability in Violeta Ayala’s and Dan Fallshaw’s The Fight 201
18. Dancing at the Border of Fiction and Fact: David B. Feinberg’s Life on the Page between Activism and Literature 221
19. Notes on Contributors 235
20. Index 239