The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

spaces and places, and enable empowerment “at particular sites, along particular
vectors”. 11
The approach thus adopted to the subject and to political history is a discursive one,
suggesting that identities are made through performance, and that through the use of
dramaturgical metaphors, the social process and political life can be viewed as drama,
with people engaging in social and political interaction in some sense, actors. 12 But this
is not an approach which sees performance as posing, and which is linked to some
concept of ‘authentic self’, as is the case with James Scott’s work on the ‘arts of
resistance’. 13 It is a notion of performance, which opens up the issues of communicative
practices in the production and dissemination of ideology and the “grammatical
complexity” of language beyond its referential aspects as well as its production in face‐
to‐face interaction. 14 It also enables us to understand that the production of a rhetoric of
political expression made up of the symbolic use of language and imagery and the
spread of certain rituals and symbols was made to work through the dramatic
construction of public life and popular politics. The staging of processes of social
11 See Lawrence Grossbergʹs discussion of agency, self and subject in his article, ‘Identity and Cultural
Studies’, especially pp 97‐102. See also the discussion of power, the subaltern and agency in Rosalind
O’Hanlon, ‘Recovering the Subject’, and the examination of the representation, recreation and
embodiment of agency and personhood in Corinne A Kratz, ‘Forging Unions and Negotiating
Ambivalence: Personhood and Complex Agency in Okiek Marriage Arrangement’, in Ivan Karp and
D.A. Masolo, eds, African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
12 See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959) for a
discussion of performance as the ‘basic stuff of everyday life’. Different genres or types of cultural and
social performance have their own style, goals and rhetoric.
13 See James Scott’s book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990). For Scott, acting and performance involved the presentation of a mask on the
part of the subordinate. In public, the subordinate masked their feelings of suppressed rage through
‘command performances’. This suppressed rage was redirected through a hidden transcript beyond the
surveillance and interference of the powerful, with the intention to create independence and solidarity.
See also the critical discussion of this book by Susan Gal, ‘Language and the ʺArts of Resistanceʺ’,
Cultural Anthropology, 10, 3, 1995.
14 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1991; first published, 1983) for an example of the creation of communities (in the form of
nations) ‐ whose members will never know or interact with each other ‐ through imagination made
possible through mediation by the artefacts of print capitalism, the regional newspaper and the novel.
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