Abstract
Autobiography and life-writing studies have recently undergone both a transcultural and an intermedial turn. Taking these developments into account, this contribution discusses autobiographical and autofictional texts by four contemporary American writers: Edward Said, Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, and Aleksandar Hemon. Their highly self-reflexive intermedial aesthetic includes word-photography configurations as well as ekphrases of pictures, and raises generic, formal, ethical, and political questions. These questions address experiences of migration as well as peripatetic and transcultural lives in our globalized modernity. The following analysis of the writers’ creative interventions brings to light an under-investigated quality of contemporary American life writing: the prominence of verbal- visual relations in transcultural texts which often touch upon topics such as the gaze, scopic regimes, and traveling images.