The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

CHAPTER ONE
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY, NARRATIVE AND THE PRODUCTION
OF HISTORY
The methodological objective of this thesis is to produce an approach to biography
which seeks a theory of discursive practice rather than a theory of the knowing subject.
This approach is one that moves away from an “unmediated and transparent notion of
the subject or identity as the centred author of social practice”. 1 In this paradigm, the
subject is not abolished or abandoned, but, acquires a decentred or displaced position. In
such an attempt to “rearticulate the relationship between subjects and discursive
practices”, the subject of identity recurs as “the question of identification”. 2
This enquiry will enable us to create a framework which transcends a dualist
understanding of the relationship between the individual and social processes, to open
up ways of understanding life histories as productions. This would mean going beyond
conventional, untheorised approaches to life history as chronological narrative, where
the major research challenges are understood as archival and empirical. It is important
to open up alternative approaches to biography that challenge history’s resistance to
theory, and pose questions about narration and self‐narration, gender and biography’s
relationship with autobiography. Only then would it be possible to develop more
complex understandings about “the lives people live and the way they tell them”. 3 This
emphasis on narration is also concerned with the multiple genres, locations and formats
through which lives have been presented and represented, through oral narrative,
1 Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds, Questions of
Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), p 2.
2 Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, p 2.
3 Vincent Crapanzano, ‘“Self”‐Centering Narratives’, in Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds, Natural
Histories of Discourse (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996), p 106.
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