Bio-Power: CBC Television's Life & Times and A&E Network's Biography on A&E

Abstract

In a section of Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson presents biography as part of the documentation of identity that is based on a forgetting and then repetition of origins that cannot be remembered. The nation itself is a narrative made of the collection of individual stories. Anderson's image of biography as the site of a forgetting and as the means of national suturing is an excellent way to examine how the genre of biography works as a social practice within national discourse in two popular biography shows on television: the American cable network A'E's flagship series Biography on A'E and the Canadian television network CBC's long-running biography programme Life & Times. In this paper, I look at selected programmes by each network about artists, political figures and sports stars as one of the latest attempts to make “biographies of the nation” on television in Canada and the United States. In my analysis, genre is understood as a set of social practices that constructs and limits many types of cultural meaning for audiences and cultural producers. “Biography” as a genre has been translated into the medium of television without losing sight of its origins in popular collective biography of the Victorian era.