The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 337 mediated by ethnographers, the personal narrative of the founder of the "Egyptian Feminist Union" (155), and African-American and French-Canadian autobiographies . Part three, "Double Messages: Maternal Legacies/Mythographies," includes essays on Margaret Oliphant, Audre Lorde, Nathalie Sarraute and Christa Wolf as well as a discussion of two Francophone writers. "De-Limiting Genre: Other Autobiographical Acts," the final section, expands the realm of autobiography with discussions of poetry and autobiography, eighteenth-century German epistolary tradition, the invented autobiographical form of a "Jewish woman in occupied France" (14), and women's self-representation in film. These essays, then, range from discussions of a female self and its many autobiographical representations, inventions, and challenges , to reconsiderations of the boundaries of autobiography as a genre. Life/Lines is an apt metaphor for this important book. Collectively the authors toss sturdy ropes into the sometimes "troubled waters" of feminist autobiography theory; they offer "essential routes of communication"; and they suggest the intricacy and inscrutability of women's life-lines—both lived and imagined. Its innovative theoretical discussions, its inclusivity, and its intelligence make this anthology a key resource for scholars of women's studies, feminist theory, and autobiography studies. Hertha D. Wong California State University, Chico Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. 203 pp. $27.50. In a spirit of neologism quite congenial with Michael J. Shapiro's TL· Politics of Representation : Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis, one might call Shapiro's chapter on "Reading Biography" an epistemographic essay. That is, Shapiro's project is to analyze the relation between writing and knowing, with the goal of understanding both activities as forms of inventing, extending, buttressing, or displacing political power. In his introductory essay on "The Problem of Ideology," Shapiro places ideology "within the metaphorical terrain of reading and writing. . . . Ideological production [can then] be characterized as a kind of writing and ideological thinking as a kind of reading, an enforced dyslexia wherein the reader is disenabled by being encouraged to adopt a politically insensitive view of the surrounding social formation and the objects, relationships, and events it contains" (6). Ideological dyslexia does not have to do with distorting the facts; on the contrary, one of the primary targets of Shapiro's criticism is the empiricist assumption that the "facts" are themselves prior to, rather than constructed during, the process of writing. Shapiro's emphasis throughout the book is on how practices of writing reflect and reproduce ways of apprehending or knowing reality which are in complicity with political forms of managing and controlling society. Shapiro wants to understand how various texts "contain meaning, how certain representational practices do their work, a work that can be arranged along a continuum of political challenge versus pious inscription of some aspect of entrenched power and authority" (67). One of the first things that will strike many readers as odd in Shapiro's chapter on biography is his wide-ranging and eclectic choice of texts for analysis, which sets autobiographies , novels, sociological studies, and sports telecasting alongside a few biogra- 338 biography Vol. 12, No. 4 phies. The effect of this eclecticism is to direct attention to the "biographical codes" operating in all of these texts to construct closely interdependent senses of selfhood and social obligation. Shapiro elicits these themes from a series of pairs of texts which offer contrasting examples of the assumptions which govern narrative and interpretive choices. For instance, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and Herman Melville's Israel Potter, with its sharply satiric portrait of Franklin, illustrate the basic polarity between pious and critical writing. Shapiro juxtaposes TL· Education of Henry Adams and JeanJacques Rousseau's Confessions in order to analyze the effects of the grammatical status afforded to the authorial voice. More complex issues, including what makes a given subject 's life worth understanding, emerge from the comparison of Jean-Paul Sartre's life of Flaubert and Michel Foucault's publication of and commentary upon the autobiographies of Herculine Barbin and Pierre Riviere. Shapiro's central preoccupation is always with the imposition of meaning upon individuals' lives, as in Benjamin Franklin's...