The Politics of Naming and Self-Definition

Sor Juana took the name Juana Inés de la Cruz when she entered the convent, choosing this identity rather than accepting an assigned one. She wrote extensively about the power of language to define reality and about who gets to name things. Colonialism operates through naming: calling indigenous peoples 'savages,' lands 'undiscovered,' histories 'primitive,' women 'emotional' rather than 'rational.' These imposed names become internalized categories that colonized people use to understand themselves. Postcolonial decolonization requires reclaiming the power to name. This includes recovering names suppressed by colonialism—indigenous names for lands, for peoples, for practices. It means creating new names for experiences colonialism tried to erase or pathologize. It means refusing the names imposed on you ('underdeveloped,' 'ethnic,' 'minority') and instead defining yourself according to your own understanding. Self-naming is political because it asserts epistemic authority: you, not the colonizer, get to say what you are. This might mean reclaiming traditional identity markers, creating new terms that better reflect your actual experience, or simply refusing imposed categories and insisting on complexity that resists simple naming. The power to define yourself is power itself.