Narrative Violence to Illocutionary Colonization

This is an early piece on the difference between narrative violence and illocutionary colonization. While illocutionary colonization is the specific mechanism I am speaking of in this piece, it is not the only form of narrative violence. This paper traces the broader problematic: that reduction is an innately violent act embedded in the structure of human communication itself, and that this endemic violence becomes weaponized within neoliberal colonial hegemony as a tool for narrative dominance and the extirpation of alternative ways of being. Illocutionary colonization — the interception and replacement of a speaker's intended meaning by a dominant interpretive authority — is one instantiation of this larger war on meaning. Drawing on the Zapatistas' resistance to the Mexican neoliberal state, the Kurdish Women's Movement's five-thousand-year struggle against patriarchal knowledge systems, and disability rights frameworks that expose the commodification of human worth, this paper examines how communities resist the violent reduction of their chronicles to the singular narrative of colonial modernity. The Kurdish mythic figure of Şahmaran — the queen of knowledge, half-human and half-serpent — surfaces at the paper's close as an unexhausted theoretical resource: a pre-theorized instance of illocutionary colonization and sovereign resistance that will be developed in subsequent work. This paper is an early marker in a larger theoretical project. I am working to expand the piece to my literature review eventually.