This diagram illustrates the cartography of colonial violence. For it, we have used the metaphor of three spirals: those of the devastation of bodies, the divestment of speech and symbols, and the divestment of land. The vertigo of post-colonial violence arises from the infrastructure which caters for the existence of the nation-state. Thus, the Dolgorukov obelisk, erected in Simferopol in 1842, the significance of which “far transcends the city of Simferopol and the Crimean Peninsula” and which commemorates Russia's three-century-long struggle for access to the Black Sea (Belova), reminds us of the gradual ousting of indigenous people out of Crimea, of the deliberate settling of the peninsula by a population of outsiders and of the subsequent distribution of Crimean Tatar lands to “new owners” in an attempt to create a mono-national and mono-religious empire.
In order to manage the disorientation, we need to resolve colonial violence into its component elements. .