Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature

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 coeditor Journal of African Cultural Studies

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

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 Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom

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 Center of African African American Research at Harvard University, and author of Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite