Dementure’s overarching theme is the historical and generational losses that have come in the wake of and as a consequence of colonialism, losses that have been maintained through the oppressive heteropatriarchal practices of sexism, racism, classism, and gender- and homophobia. The thematic threads of loss of home, loss of education or educational oppression, loss of equitable work or alienated labor, loss of self or misplaced identities, and the role and place of people of color in the U.S. and the tactics used to enforce and keep them in their correct positions demonstrate the impacts of colonialism, so that Dementure highlights the specific shapes loss takes in the twenty-first century and the decolonial responses to the permanence of this historical disenfranchisement and displacement. In addition, a sub-theme running through the narrative of Dementure is the idea of work and labor—mental, physical, and psychical—involved in living out of a displaced life.
Emerging at a crucial moment in the history of U.S. imperialism, Dementure takes stock of what it means to live out of generations of socio-cultural, economic, and political policies that have come to define the very structure of U.S. society and to shape our interactions with each other. The work also illustrates to what extent some go to break from and interrupt patterns of loss, and, in the throes of attempting this, of living out of colonized identities, what it means to keep one’s sanity. It is a body of work that highlights contemporary threads in a history of generational loss, uncovering new patterns of dominance that rearticulate old practices, all of which speak significantly to ideas about the place of people color in the U.S. and their relationship to a country many call home.