Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature

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. 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.