A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

The third crucial element of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is the concept of the
nomad. The writers base this idea upon a historical nomad, liberated from territory and
norms. Nomad thought, or “nomadology,” is premised upon multiple and non-rigidified
lines of action, and the plurality of causalities in history. 10 Nomadology is also
positioned as the opposite of history as it is focused upon “perpetual displacement”
versus the “sedentary,” reductivistic and biased nature of what the authors deem to be
history. 11 Deleuze argues that the historical event cannot be seen as a singular,
homogenous entity, but a nomadic, vast and multiple phenomenon. 12 Furthermore,
nomad theory is related to the rhizome where connections are multiple and all-
encompassing, and all phenomena are mobile and transitory. But the nomad exemplifies
movement more than the rhizome which is the pattern of that movement. The nomad is
perhaps the notion most applicable to histories of colonialism because, not only can the
nomad represent the colonial native or colonizing settler, but it can also portray the
structures and ideologies within colonial discourse and policy.
Schizoanalytic, rhizomatic and nomadologic thought form the foundation of the
“admittedly difficult notion” of deterritorialization. 13 The concept is problematic to
explain since it is defined by the authors in abstract semiotic terms. Deterritorialization
exhibits rhizomatic interactions by challenging conceptions of territoriality and linking
separated entities. Though the root of the word is spatial, deterritorialization itself does
not require spatial movement, for it can exist on the level of ideology, belief and
structural transformation. 14 The authors characterize deterritorialization itself as the
movement out of what they label a territory, object or phenomenon into a new
composition. More fundamentally, deterritorialization can also be a decoding of essences
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