The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

manifest dishonesty. Through a case study of Frida Kahlo, this chapter also examines the
cultural politics of biography’s intersection with the making of celebrity as her life was
appropriated within the Hollywood biopic. This chapter also studies the entry of
biography into symbolic topographies and landscapes of heritage, through the memorial
complex and the Heroes’ Acre, and argues that in spite of the biographic contests of
memory that have emerged, the most productive approaches to biography in the public
domain have occurred through museum exhibitions, which have explored the
relationship between biography and image making, as well as lives as cultural
productions.
Chapters Three and Four focus on the features of resistance history and political
biography in the academy and the public domain in South Africa. Chapter Three
examines the conventional biographic research prominent in resistance studies
conducted within the field of South African documentary history, associated with and
inspired by the work of Tom Karis and Gwendolen Carter. It also examines the
approaches to life history on the part of South African social historians who have
emphasised the lives of local leaders, and have focused on lives of ordinary people as
units of collective experience and as prisms of social processes. Both documentary
historians and social historians sought to narrate recovered pasts into realist narratives
of the nation, based upon conventional hierarchies of source and history. Biographies of
leaders and ordinary people were created as ready‐made stories of the nation in
microcosm, with people placed into pre‐ordained categories of resistance, without any
attention given to processes of subject construction or narratives of life.
What occurred in this research was a ‘double’ or ‘compound modernism’, involving an
encounter between modernist historical methods and the modernist imaginaries of
political institutions and national or local leaders, or individuals understood as bearers
of pre‐determined group identities. Some studies, however, began to pose questions
about life history, symbolism and identity and the terrain of resistance itself. Clifton
Crais has argued for a focus on the subaltern through a culturalist understanding of the
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