Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography

ABSTRACT

South African political biography has largely reproduced a ‘biographical illusion’ by approaching political lives as characterised by an ordered sequence of acts, events and works, with individuals characterised by stability, autonomy, self-determination and rational choice. The concerns of this approach have been to construct national histories in which leaders have been made to speak as national subjects through resistance history. The documentary collections of Thomas Karis, Gwendolen Carter, Gail Gerhart, Sheridan Johns and Allison Drew connected political leaders’ public lives to the high politics of resistance institutions. In the same vein, the work of documentary narration by Gail Gerhart, John Hendricks, Joshua Lazerson, Catherine Higgs and Steven Gish presented accounts of resistance through notions of leadership and biography which privileged the national political formation and the chronological lives of national political leaders. What occurred in this research was a ‘double’ or ‘compound modernism’, involving an encounter between modernist historical methods and the modernist imaginaries of political institutions and national or local leaders. This article shows how it may be possible to approach political biography and resistance history in new ways, through a focus on biographical production, biographical relations, the cultural politics of lives and institutions, and the idea of biographic contestation. Biographic research can be approached through questions about the conditions and relations through which biographic narratives came to be produced. In this way it is possible to open up analytical spaces in the academy and institutions of public history, for furthering biographic representation beyond modernism.

Keywords:

• auto/biography
• biographical illusion
• biographical relations
• documentary history
• storied lives