130 Elizabeth Deligio
history through colonization; they had always been present due to the
ordering of nature (Mignolo & Escobar, 2010). Sociologist Aníbal Quijano
(2000) writes that universality and ahistoricity were an important extension
of Western power that allowed the West to establish every aspect of its
culture, language, and knowledge as normative. The fact that ahistoricity
and universality operate on an epistemological or foundational level of
knowledge guarantees reproduction unless they are challenged.
Decolonial theorist Maldonado-Torres (2007) extends the control of
land, resources, and people to include control over epistemologies or how
colonized people knew themselves. Colonization was the invasion of land
and knowledge systems. Colonization transformed the way colonized
people would encounter and learn their culture, language, and history for
generations to come.
Understanding the impact of the invasion of knowledge systems is
especially important for the consideration of memory and how colonization
understood and changed temporality, or the relationship to time for the
colonized. Alejandro Vallega (2014) theorizes that colonization operated
from a linear temporality. The linear relationship to time constructed a past
that minimized or erased the histories and memories of the colonized and
gave control over the present (and by extension the future) to the colonizer.
Vallega (2014) argues that linear temporalities were emphasized to make
the past become a site of erasure and the present and the future sites of
alienation, as the colonized could not exercise any control over them. The
question of the repression of memory and in turn history is explored early
in the field of psychology through the work of Sigmund Freud and others
(Herman, 1997). Freud’s (1986/1962, p. 203) early exploration focused on
the experience of women in therapy who were revealing incidents of
sexual abuse from earlier in their lives. Freud originally concluded that
women were recovering repressed memories of the abuse. However, after
much pressure he re-wrote his conclusion stating that the women were
engaging in fantasies of sexual violence and were not actual victims. The
denial of his first conclusion came from the inability of Freud and others in
the field to face the widespread sexual violence present in Viennese society
(Herman, 1997). On a micro-scale the story of Freud’s patients shows the