This thesis is an analysis of the intermedial body of work by the work by the Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole (1976 -). I argue that his work is best understood as a single, overarching project, unified by what I term Cole's 'aesthetic of uncertainty.' This aesthetic uses uncertainty and cognate terms such as hybridity, ambiguity, indeterminacy and opacity to stimulate and engage his audience by leaving them unsure, through different means and to different ends. I show how in his fictional work this happens narratologically, but also by blurring boundaries of genre, and subverting market expectations. Generic indeterminacy also plays a role in Cole's visual mode, as he combines images and text in innovative, productive ways that provoke his audience to examine their own understanding of photography's affordances, and how they look at the world. I then consider the complex strategies of mediation that Cole utilises, through the lens of recent work by Anna Kornbluh. The philosophical and musical manifestations of uncertainty are under consideration in the final main chapter, as I explore the ethos of the blues and Black Pragmatism in Cole's most recent novel. I conclude by considering Cole's uneasy status as a public intellectual and his own uncertainty in the role. I use a mix of methodological approaches that are appropriate to each chapter, but each one is built on a foundation of close reading that seeks to locate the texts, whether fictional, factual, photographic, or a hybrid of these forms, as part of a vast network of informing intertexts.