ABOUT THIS BOOK

Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature explores how normative ideas of sex and gender have shaped the development of Nigerian literature. Tracing this influence from the rise of mid-twentieth-century modernist writing to the contemporary appearance of LGBTQIA literature, Kerry Manzo presents a new framework for understanding Nigerian literature, one in which sexuality and gender—or more specifically, their containment through national discourses of heteronormativity in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria—are central to its problematics and poetics. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and archival materials, including institutional records, personal letters, small publications, and other ephemera, Manzo illuminates the historical and material conditions that have placed limitations on the literary representation of women and sexual minorities and shaped the national masculine tradition of letters.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kerry Manzo is an assistant professor of Global Studies and chair of General Studies program at the State University of New York at Purchase College. In his research, he is interested in decolonial methods for thinking about sex/ual and gender diversity in twentieth and twenty-first-century African literature, including its institutions and histories. Building on established work in Global South feminisms, queer and trans theory, and postcolonial criticism, Manzo seeks to discern the effects of the cisheteronormativity implicit within coloniality on literary expression, publication, and reception of Anglophone African literature, while also seeking within that literature the signs of resistance that emerge when patriarchy, heterosexualism, and cisgenderism are denaturalized. Manzo is the recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Pauline Yu Fellow in Comparative Literature, the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and the Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His published articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. Manzo is a member of the Queer African Studies Association, a coordinate organization of the African Studies Association. He contributes annually to the research and writing for the “New Literatures: Eastern Africa” section of The Year’s Work in English Studies. He earned his doctorate in comparative literature, globalization, and translation at Texas Tech University.

REVIEWS

Kerry Manzo’s compelling book is both timely and necessary. An intellectually daring work of literary history, Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature is an exciting milestone in the field, disrupting the cloying orthodoxies of African literary history in rigorous, culturally nuanced ways, keeping us spellbound as we compulsively turn pages filled with exhilarating discoveries and fascinating re-readings.

— Terri Ochiagha, lecturer, the University of Edinburgh, McMillan-Stewart Fellow at the Hutchins Cente

Kerry Manzo’s bold and original study reshapes how we understand Nigerian literature, revealing how colonialism, heterosexual normativity, and gendered power have shaped the conditions of literary emergence. Moving from the Mbari writers of the mid-twentieth century to today’s queer literary voices, Manzo offers powerful new concepts—like ‘heterocolonial modernity’ and ‘contiguity’—to trace how marginalized writers have been excluded and silenced, and yet have endured. Both rigorous and lyrical, Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature is a vital intervention that challenges dominant literary genealogies and opens space for reimagining African literature through the lenses of sex, gender, and power.

— Lindsey Green-Simms, author of Queer African Cinemas

African literary studies needs scholarship such as Kerry Manzo’s Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature. This meticulously researched, theoretically astute, and methodologically innovative book offers a brilliant account of the emergence and burgeoning of queer African literature. Manzo’s book makes a singular contribution to the field and is a must-read for scholars and students in postcolonial, African, and Global South gender and sexuality studies.

— Kanika Batra, author of Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights and

This book is a vital intervention into global queer, trans, and feminist studies. Kerry Manzo brings the concept of ‘heterocolonial modernity’ into view through richly textured yet surgically precise readings of literary, legal, and anthropological texts from and about Nigeria, from the 1960s to the 2000s. Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature offers a fresh account of Nigerian literary modernism, disentangling the operations of heteronormativity in both the history of the movement and texts themselves, as well as demonstrating the complexity of the signifier ‘woman’ between indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial nationalist models of gender, sexuality, the self, and the body. To read ‘contiguously’ is to look at how different historically specific discourses do not unfold continuously one after the other, but move simultaneously alongside one another, sometimes sliding apart or overlapping, and how these contiguities ricochet through and are realigned by literary texts—and this interpretive model is an important contribution to literary studies at large. A must-read for queer African studies.

— Brenna M. Munro, associate professor of English at the University of Miami, and author of South Afri

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