ABSTRACT
“Yes, Jerry, the assumption underpinning virtually all of this work IS that for working people to speak for themselves, about their own history, IS somehow a political act in itself.” 1 These are the words of Stephen Yeo, an academic defender of working-class writing, replying to another historian who had suggested that local history needed to go “beyond autobiography” to more explicit socialist and theoretical modes of writing. 2 One of the issues at stake between the two writers is the adequacy of the autobiographical mode to expose the real determining instances in a person's life, and thus to carry a progressive political meaning. For Jerry White, Yeo's adversary in this argument, autobiography is in effect intrinsically inadequate; rooted in locality and confined to the language of reminiscence and common sense, it is incapable of comprehending those larger forces, especially economic ones, which are the final determinations of collective life. For Yeo, the implications of such an argument are authoritarian at least; for him, as my opening quotation asserts so strongly, it is enough for working people to speak for themselves to constitute a political act. However, what assumption underpins Yeo's assumption? For working-class autobiography to be defined as political presupposes that writing is already class divided, and that the political act consists in the simple fact of making a space for otherwise excluded or “underside” views of the world amongst dominant and received ways of viewing the past. The definition is not so much a categorical one as a pointer to the situation in which the writing occurs: politics is here to be understood in the sense of the politics of discourse. For Jerry White, by contrast, politics has a more traditional, narrower, but perhaps stronger meaning: overt class-conflict in the economy and society.
