This book explores the construction of subjectivity and advances a theoretical account of the processes through which subjectivities are constituted in the context of a two-fold study of black subjectivity. The first three chapters are devoted to the deconstruction of the black subject construed by scientific psychology, and the remainder is devoted to developing a theoretical approach to the construction of particular post colonial black subjectivities. The western academic establishment has historically construed the black subject in ways that have stereotyped and derogated black people, upholding white supremacist regimes. Colonial and white-dominated psychological discourses about the African and the Negro are deconstructed and revealed as the product of the social conditions and the power relations that have characterized western society. New theories of identity developed by contemporary black American psychologists are criticized as limited by the empiricist paradigm. A case study of 14 black women constructing their own subjectivities is used as the basis for a theory of subjectivity that conceptualizes subjectivity as multiple, dynamic, and continuously produced in the course of social relations that are themselves changing. (Contains 358 references.) (SLD)