The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

through particular enunciative strategies. Through this perspective, it also becomes
possible to breach the divide between the public and the private, the political and the
personal, and to reflect on the individual in a more complex way. 110
Within social history and historical sociology, little attention has been paid to the
narration of lives, to the relationship between subjects and discursive practices and to
the question of narrative worlds into which people are born. Some new ground has been
forged in anthropological work. However, it is mainly within literary studies,
particularly among literary critics interested in autobiography, more than in history and
the social sciences, that analytical and theoretical interest in understanding lives as
productions has found expression. And, for biography to be meaningful to history, it
needs to use these theoretical insights developed within literary interpretation and
cultural criticism.
Biography and narrative
Literary theories of auto/biography have had a set of distinct emphases, which stem
from their concern for the nature and expression of subjectivity and selves, their interest
in the production of narrative, their consideration of these issues in relation to a fact‐
fiction dichotomy and from a concern to problematise modes of truth presentation. It is
necessary for traditional conceptual and disciplinary divides to be transcended in order
that the study of pastness through biography can move beyond conventional realist
models of great lives as well as the essentialist identities of social history.
The sociologist Norman Denzin has drawn on the theoretical insights of literary theory,
arguing that it is not enough to assert that biographical coherence is an ‘illusion’. What
must be determined, instead, is how life coherence in texts is established, what the
sources of this coherence are, and how the narratives underpinning them are
110 In her work on ‘complex agency’, Kratz begins to talk of ‘collective individuals’; see 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.
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