Reading biography : the democratisation of biography and contested ownership of memories and narrative

Abstract

Over recent decades major social changes and rapid technological advances have occurred in the West. These developments have contributed to the rise of a modern publishing phenomenon: mass public participation in the production and consumption of various forms of biography. This has been evidenced in several ways. Firstly, the commercially produced auto/biographical market has grown dramatically in recent years. I suggest that with this growth there has developed an implicit social understanding that a subject, or a subject's friends, relatives, even enemies, have a right of reply to the printed word. Additionally, greater access to information across media forms has enabled increased public scrutiny and discussion of the formally produced narrative as never before. Likewise, there has been mass growth and diversity in informal productions of life writing, such as: personal and family websites, scrap-booking, journals, diaries, zines, memoirs, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, privately commissioned biographies and family histories/genealogies. The salient feature of such biography is the confidence with which it is produced, and it can be phrased effectually as a statement that my life is worth telling too. The net effect of such a cultural and social movement can be referred to as a democratisation of biography. It represents a significant discursive shift in the formulation and reading of the biographical narrative, which can be rearticulated as a popular questioning of the concept of control over what is a cultural and social participatory artefact. This conceptual awareness or cultural literacy scrutinises and presents an altogether new challenge to the constituent elements of power as exerted over the telling of lives. This power consists of: control specifically over the privileging of certain types of lives; control over the socially determined meaning of lives and their unitary representation; control over the representation of relationships; control over the relinquishment of memory; control over the styling or codifying of narrative; and control over the silencing of life narratives excluded from a normative canon of life commemoration.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English