Class in the discourses of Sindiwe Magona's autobiography and fiction

Abstract

The origin of the tendency for class factors to be masked by the discourse of race in recent autobiographies by black women can be traced to the 1970s and the reversal, in Black Consciousness thinking, of the hierarchical binary of apartheid. This masking is evident at the level of experience in Sindiwe Magona's autobiography—at the level of discourse it continues as, writing in the 1980s, she retells her life. Magona's narration of selfhood is, however, comparatively conscious of the discursive foundations of subjectivity. Given the power of this discourse to conceal as well as to reveal, the functioning of autobiography as a source of ‘history from below’ becomes questionable and it is suggested that the autobiographical pact, as a reading pact, may mean that a writer like Magona is effectively more free to represent the experience and meaning of class through her fiction than in her autobiography.