In the heart of the country: The auto/biographies of Ayesha Dawood and Fatima Meer

South African struggle auto/biography has been a male-dominated genre in which the political has correspondingly dominated the personal. These life narratives have presented the formation of relatively coherent, autonomous selfhoods constructing a stable narrative of anti-Apartheid political history. Male struggle auto/ biography hassince the 1980 s been counterbalanced by female auto/biography, existing in the margins of social and historical discourse. In the post-2000 period, a number of struggle auto/ biographies have been published which appear to shift the prevailing norms of the genre to highlight the relationality of subject constitution, in which the family has been presented as the most significant matrix of self-formation