The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

are also to be found in the ‘storied life’ of the subject, just as they may have been forged
in the mutually constitutive settings of biographical relations and in the documentary
imperatives, plots and patterns of biographical institutions. Indeed, they constitute
genealogies of biographical production, which shape and influence the contours of
contemporary productions through their narrative selections, silences and transactions.
This perspective suggests ways in which it is possible to view biography through the
methodological lens of the production of history, in which history is understood as “the
processing of the past in societies and historical settings … and the struggles for control
of voices and texts in innumerable settings which animate this processing of the past”.
As a “field of practice”, the production of history encompasses, inter alia, “the organising
sociologies” of historicising projects, commemorative events, “the structuring of frames
of record‐keeping” as well as “the contentions and struggles which evoke and produce
texts and which also produce historical literatures”. 125 This broader approach to the
production of historical knowledge is also concerned to understand the practices and
genres of history making outside the academy, as well as how these relate to the peculiar
routines and rituals of academic practice. What are the points of connection, transition
and translation between these domains of history? With these questions and methods, it
may indeed be possible to speak of the production of auto/biography.
As part of understanding the process of producing biography, it is necessary to question
the claim that historians may make to be uncovering ‘the truth’. What is being created,
instead, is a subject in a text that is written. There is no ‘real’ person behind the text. The
language of biography in fact cannot be taken as a window “into the ‘real’ world of ‘real’
interacting subjects”. Rather, persons are created in texts. Any approach that perpetuates
a distinction between ‘factual history’, containing non‐fictional scholarship as truth, and
‘fiction’, taken to consist of imagined facts and facticities, is unhelpful in enabling a
125 David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp 244‐5;
see also David William Cohen, ‘Further Thoughts on the Production of History’, in Gerald Sider and
Gavin Smith (eds), Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1997).
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