Public Lecture by Professor Cassandra Pybus
Subaltern Lives Recovered from the Colonial Archives
Streaming audio file (requires RealPlayer): http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/conferences/conferences_2006/CPybusPL.WMA
The impulse to biography may often be national, but almost without fail the biographical project is driven by notions of exceptionalism. It is an elite view of the national interest that conventional biography serves up to legions of loyal readers. So, the question that interests me is this: What difference does it make, and what kind of conceptual work do we need to do, to think about biography not just as transnational, but taking as its subject obscure, even subjugated lives? I do not accept the view that such life stories properly reside in the historical sub-genre of micro-history, as an exemplar of the wider culture, rather than biography, which celebrates the singularity of the individual.
To illustrate my point, this paper will discuss the life stories of two runaway slaves: Billy Blue, who ran from his master in New York in 1759 and Mary Perth, fled her master in Virginia in 1776. In raw colonial environments at the opposite ends of the globe, the struggle of each to find dignity and self-determination presents us with a singular biography that also allows for a more complex reading of the world(s) in which they constructed multifaceted identities. By virtue of being painstakingly recovered from the vast colonial archives of America, Canada, West Africa and Australia, these biographical narratives necessarily provide new insights into the ways in which identity was formed and reformed in a transnational environment, and also speak to the complex legacy of slavery in the British Empire.
Cassandra Pybus currently holds a Writer’s Fellowship from the
Literature Fund of the Australia Council and is Adjunct Professor in
the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University
of Sydney. She was a Fulbright Professor at Georgetown University in
Washington DC in 2001, Coca Cola International Fellow at the Center
for Jefferson Studies in Virginia in 2003 and Australian Research Council
Professorial Fellow from 2001-2005. She is the author of eleven books,
including Gross Moral Turpitude, which won the 1994 Colin Roderick Award,
and the controversial biography, The Devil and James McAuley, which
won the 2000 Adelaide Festival Award. She has recently published two
books: Epic Journeys of Freedom (Beacon Press, 2006) and Black Founders
(UNSW Press 2006). Cassandra is a HRC Visiting Fellow, July-August 2006.