Contemporary postcolonial Gothic provides a language for reengaging with the political realities of the post/neo-colonial present, speaking truths that are structurally repressed elsewhere,especially the lived realities of twenty-first-century postcolonial societies in the face of systemic violence and the structural exclusion of minority voices. This chapter explores how the irrealist aesthetics of twenty-first-century postcolonial Gothic function as critical commentary on the systemic failings of the contemporary moment, linking these failings to a history of colonisation, yet going further than the critique of colonial discourse or epistemology that predominated in twentieth-century postcolonial Gothic literature and criticism. The subgenre of postcolonial Gothic has evolved to encounter new contexts wrought by environmental disaster and resurgent nationalism that require action in the present in order to create a usable future, to address new racisms emerging from neo-imperial and nationalistic movements, and to repurpose new monsters suited to systemic critique.
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