THE Inscription of Violence Territory and Colonial Trauma

Abstract

This text seeks to analyze elements that allow us to consider the relationship between colonial trauma and territory, arguing that colonial violence is not limited to economic exploitation, but produces a permanent psychic wound by breaking the historical, symbolic, and material bonds that a people establish with their territory. Territory is understood not as mere property, but as a constitutive field of ways of life, collective memory, and identity. In the text, I consider the concepts of Orientalism and palimpsest, developed by Said, to show how colonial discourse imposes a single narrative on territory, inferiorizing non-European cultures and justifying their domination. Said also helps to think of construction of the identity as intrinsically fissured, without a pure origin, avoiding exclusivist nationalisms. This conceptual apparatus is complemented in dialogue with Lélia Gonzalez, to analyze the racial division of space in Brazil, the naturalization of the subalternity of Black and Indigenous peoples, the myth of racial democracy as symbolic violence, as well as Amefricanidade as a possibility of active identities of resistance. Thus, in Gonzalez, we will analyze the notions of Amefricanidade and memory as resistance to historical erasure. At the end of the analysis, I seek to understand how colonial trauma can be understood as a secular wound, updated daily by structural racism, by forced deterritorialization, and by the artificially imposed relationship with territory.