Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature

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.

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

• Chapter One. Crying in the Wilderness: Gender Politics of MbariChapter Two. Sublimations and Shadows: Sexual Politics of Ibadan Modernism in Black OrpheusChapter Three. Sexual Foils and Sexual Others: Rendering the Queer BodyChapter Four. Shrinking, Shifting Ground: Transing the Coloniality of GenderChapter Five. Lesbian Specters and Speculations: Woman-to-Woman Marriage and the Bio-Logic of HeterocolonialityChapter Six. Figures on the Horizon: Queer Temporalities and Epistemologies