A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

historiography has traditionally removed the agency of colonial natives. But Deleuze and
Guattari warn that excessive focus upon the human figure in history can obscure the
forces of history that restrain the human. This contention obviously belies the structural
dynamic of their theory as well as casting doubt on the place of human agency in their
conception. 68 Yet the authors attempt at all junctures to eschew “micro-fascisms” and all
dominating forces that oppress the individual. 69 This is because human agency and
society determine the nature and degree of the deterritorializations. Colonial agency can
be abrogated within structuralist conceptions like deterritorialization, as Mahmoud
Mamdani argues, but sufficient human agency is retained within deterritorialization. 70
The authors have a comparable applicability in both world history and
postcolonial studies. 71 Deleuze and Guattari best parallel postcolonial writing in their
stress upon difference. Russell Berman’s, Homi Bhabha’s, Guha’s and Thomas’ focus
upon the hybrid and transgressive nature of colonial experience in representing the
culturally diverse mirror Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of heterogeneity. 72 Thomas’
argument that colonialism cannot be seen as wholly destructive to either colonizers or
colonized is also very similar to the two authors’ ideas. 73 This is not to minimize the
appreciable horror of colonial conquest but merely to present the idea that positive and
negative, good and bad both flowed and ebbed in the colonies. As well, the perpetual
spatial transformation of the deterritorialized colonial subject works in complete
opposition to the “fixity” that Bhabha identifies in traditional colonialist discourse. 74
Finally, it is the process of negotiation between deterritorialization and reterritorialization
that most mimics Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and ambiguity in colonial
representation. 75 The similarities between work in postcolonial studies and the two
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