Those tell you where the person was born, perhaps what the ancestors were, the childhood, the education, the greatness and then the death. Usually, this is about one life, and you don t get very much about what was going on around the life. Those kinds of biographies usually don t have theory in them. Subaltern biography is the biography of subjects who are people whose lives are circumscribed in some way. Subalterns can be white women because women still do face limitations in life on account of their sex or their gender.
Subaltern biography is about people who are relatively powerless.
I stress the relatively because not all subaltern people are equally powerless, and one person can change over a lifetime. For instance, when I was a young black girl I was more subaltern than I am now as a chaired professor, not to mention a governor s lecturer. To a certain extent, we read all biographies for lessons on how to live. But when we read subaltern biographies, the biographies of women or people of color or other racial or ethnic minorities, we identify with those subjects. For instance, I have heard white women who are biographers of white women express chagrin when they discover that their subject was a lousy parent or was a treacherous friend.