Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature
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- ISBN 9781611865578
- Weight: 313g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Michigan State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
