Description:
Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature explores how normative ideas of sex and gender have shaped the development of Nigerian literature. The book traces this influence from the rise of mid-twentieth-century modernist writing to the contemporary appearance of LGBTQIA literature.
Review Quotes:
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