Afterword

Lucas Bessire discusses the 'imperial debris'--the ways that residues of colonialism, slavery and genocide linger subjacent to and resurface within our cherished mythologies about the language of difference, of privilege and dispossession. Bessire asserts that it's no surprise that today's forms of hate, nonsense and inequity exceed the fixed categories of sociolinguistic theory and practice. What is less expected is how this constellation of gaps and excess in language becomes a novel political form of its own, a regime of governance that takes shape through managing and weaponizing linguistic disjunctures and essentialisms--if language for a form of oppression, repression or suffering is repressed or not-invented, the social problem that cannot be named cannot be repaired, and this, without fail, is constructed to benefit the rich, powerful hegemony at the expense of disenfranchised people.