In the heart of the country: The auto/biographies of Ayesha Dawood and Fatima Meer
Abstract
South African struggle auto/biography has been a male-dominated
genre in which the political has correspondingly dominated the
personal. These life narratives have presented the formation of
relatively coherent, autonomous selfhoods constructing a stable
narrative of anti-Apartheid political history. Male struggle auto/
biography hassince the 1980 s been counterbalanced by female
auto/biography, existing in the margins of social and historical
discourse. In the post-2000 period, a number of struggle auto/
biographies have been published which appear to shift the prevailing
norms of the genre to highlight the relationality of subject
constitution, in which the family has been presented as the most
significant matrix of self-formation.