The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

and survival against the onslaught of virulent racism and disruptive capitalism. Both
images of resistance ‐ that of democratic and visionary leadership and that of the ‘nobility
of the ordinary’ ‐ fed into the post‐apartheid biographic moment and provided a sense of
history in the service of the nation.
In the face of these approaches, Stephen Clingman has shown how it is possible to ask
more complex questions about life history, symbolism and identity. Clifton Crais, on the
other hand, has chosen to move the resistance goalposts and has shifted attention away
from the modernist to the quotidian as the basis of understanding lives of politics. These
challenges arose as struggles continued to unfold over the appropriate lines of enquiry in
historical representation, over the tasks and challenges of a radical history in South Africa
after apartheid. These struggles unfolded inside and outside the academy, as sites and
forums beyond the university seminar room emerged as critical domains for contesting
public pasts. For us to enter the terrain of the cultural politics of biography means
engaging in a wider debate over the definitions of the individual, the nature of the subject,
and the search for new forms of identity and subjectivity. To this we add an essential focus
upon the politics of biographic production as a means of transcending the unmediated,
stable, oppositional subjects of resistance narratives. This would include examining such
questions as biographical relations, the conditions and impetus of production, as well as
biographic contestation. Understanding life histories beyond the realm of the real will
enable us to acknowledge that we are productions, and that the stories we tell have to do
with the stories we wish people to know about ourselves as we make sense of the
hybridities from which we are constituted.
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