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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.
 

Examines forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged in relation to growing anti-homosexual violence in Kenya.
 
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, for example, bead necklaces, plastics, and even diapers have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
 
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of various imagined threats to intimate life. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.