Coolness and Precarious Labour

Introducing a volume of papers from a conference held at the Free University in Berlin during November 2010 and gathered together under the title of The Cultural Career of Coolness, Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit say: Cool is an American (English) word that has been integrated into the vocabulary of many languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But what is the history of the term ‘cool’? When has coolness come to be associated with contemporary self-fashioning?1