ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the issues of subjectivity, language and the postcolonial context, as such the categories used to describe our social worlds must necessarily be read through the palimpsest of historical and contemporary circuits of power and identity politics. Hannah Botsis completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests include postcolonial language biographies and theories of subjectivity and power. The founding tenet of a poststructural orientation to language and identity is that language is constitutive of subjectivity and difference. The term 'identity' often seems to imply the sense of a singular authentic self. The study of language and identity in South African is starting to shift toward more poststructural, discursive orientations. The choice of English as the language of the liberation movement was only one part of a complex quotidian language politics.
