Delving into biographical histories this week brought me\nback to what I have always found so interesting in history: storytelling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am, and have always been, an avid reader of fiction,\nbiography and autobiography. Whether it\u2019s 1950s rural Naples (My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante<\/em>),\nthe fictional town of Macondo in rural Colombia (One Hundred Years of Solitutde, Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez<\/em>) or mid-20th<\/sup>\ncentury Kyoto (Memoirs of a Geisha,\nArthur Golden<\/em>), it\u2019s these characters and their settings that reveal to me\nmost vividly, the intricate complexities of history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I do not mean to oversimplify the method of practising\nbiographical history by comparing it to reading or writing fiction since that\nis not the purpose of this historiographical approach. However, what I can say\nis how pleasantly surprised I was to find how similarly gripping I found these\nstories to be. These individual\u2019s transnational lives \u2013 convicts, wives, nobles\nand the like \u2013 made for incredibly interesting, page-turning history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, I also understand the criticisms of\nbiographical history as anecdotal or obscure. One life, out of the billions\nthat have existed, cannot possibly represent a historical process, a structure,\nan idea. Furthermore, as voiced by Clare Anderson, the choice of the subject is\nultimately that of the biographers, in which some peoples\u2019 lives, but not\nothers, are seen as important or interesting enough to be committed to\nbiography. The presentation of these subjects can often tell you just as much\nabout the biographer as it can about the lives that are being portrayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, criticisms of this form stems from the assumption\nthat individual\u2019s emotions, experiences and ideas have only anecdotal value in\ndescribing the great narrative of history; that the purpose of history itself\nis to describe and understand this great historical narrative rather than\nindividual\u2019s stories. If you take this view when writing biographical history,\ndescribing a life as representational of other lives in a country, a religious\ncommunity, an era for example, you can end up putting people into categories,\nwhich can obscure the complexities biographical writing is so good at\nrevealing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other hand, if we look for discord and resistance in\nanomalous lives, particularly that which looks at colonial subjects, we can\narguably lose sight of colonialism\u2019s universal attributes and grander power\nstructures and thus undermine an anti-colonial politics that is responsive to\nthe commonalities of experience among the colonised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tensions between the micro and the macro, the particular\nand the universal, the individual and their contexts, are all inherent to the\npractise of transnational history. Yet, the biographies in the readings this\nweek struck me, not for their value in confirming or challenging larger issues\nor narratives, but for their ability to evoke a more empathetic kind of\nhistorical understanding, like that gained when reading literature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Biographies allow historians to be more sensitive to lived\nexperiences of individuals whilst gaining an insight into the complex networks\nof wider, transnational historical processes, be it inter-colonial\nconstructions of race or contradictions in the social hierarchies of the\nBritish imperial world. It is often also written in a way that is often more\naccessible and engaging to a procrastination-prone individual (like myself). I\u2019ve\nnever tackled a biography before, and have very little idea as to how to even\nbegin to go about it, but perhaps it is the answer I\u2019ve been waiting for, to\nget back to the root of what I thought history was all about, telling a story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Delving into biographical histories this week brought me back to what I have always found so interesting in history: storytelling. I am, and have always been, an avid reader of fiction, biography and autobiography. Whether it\u2019s 1950s rural Naples (My<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-je","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1193,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions\/1193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}