An Ambiguous Genre for Ambiguous Subjects: Youth, Biography and Intergenerational Social Mobility in South Africa

Biography occupies a place in between science and art, beholden both to the truth of an individual life, the details of which can be proved by documents and other people, but open to the creativity of the biographer, who is given sufficient license to interpret the meaning of that life, in its historical context. Similarly, the ambiguous category of youth is generally constructed as “in between”, a phase wedged in the middle of childhood and adulthood.

I reflect on the value of this ambiguous genre (biography) for making sense of an ambiguous category of people (youth), describing a book project on social mobility that uses individual lives, over generations, to unpack how important relationships can improve people’s life chances. I first describe a chapter focused on the diary of AZ Berman, a person like my Jewish ancestors, immigrants from Eastern European ghettos who travelled to South Africa and experienced significant upward social mobility under a form of racial capitalism. Berman’s life is compared to the challenges faced by a young Black South African man I have known for ten years, who struggles for upward mobility under global capitalism post-apartheid. The biographical approach shows how both young men try/tried to leverage relationships forged beyond the racial ghettos where they were born, attempting to catalyse upward mobility in different historical contexts. The value of using biography as a methodological tool lies in its status, like youth, as something in between art and science, enabling the biographer to create a silhouette of individual human beings against the backdrop of the multiple places they traverse, connecting the macro and the micro whilst remaining true to available information and the historical narrative.