The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

denies the centrality of the subject in both theory and in everyday life. 74 Jean and John
Comaroff, for their part, worry that, in the main, social science persists in treating
biography as a “neutral, transparent window into history”. In so doing it serves to
perpetuate the ‘biographical illusion’: to regard persons and performances “in the
Promethean mode”, to “find the motors of the past and the present in rational
individualism”, and to pay little heed to the social and cultural forms that “silently
shape and constrain human action”. 75
In spite of such criticisms, which point to the limitations of much of conventional
biography, Rhiel and Suchoff have shown how seductive the lure of its codes and
conventions have been, even for those (in the United States) wanting to destabilise
mainstream culture by telling the stories of ‘different’ lives, instead of those of great,
white men. In attempting to challenge the status quo, these “new biographers” ‐ some
driven by feminist perspectives or postcolonial thinking ‐ make use of “seductively
traditional modes of self‐telling” in articulating life stories of cultural difference. Rhiel
and Suchoff suggest that these attempts to enable new identities to be heard may instead
exercise a neutralising or constraining force as well. The new subjects who speak may
lose “resistant cultural particularity” under the powerful conventions of traditional
biography. 76
Biography’s history
Biography also has a history. It is within literary studies that biography, seen as a genre
in its own right rather than merely a research method, has been better historicised.
Biography in the modern form emerged in the eighteenth century with the development
of the notion of the independent individual. In the nineteenth century, biography had a
predominantly eulogistic, ‘obituary’ function, with much of biography the product of
vanity. It was at this time that the concepts of ‘career’ and ‘life‐course’ took root as
74 Norman K Denzin, Interpretive Biography, p 61.
75 Jean and John Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder: Westview, 1993, p 26.
76 Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, ‘Introduction: The Seductions of Biography’, in Mary Rhiel and David
Suchoff, eds, The Seductions of Biography, pp 1‐3.
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