Tadiwa Madenga is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work and site specificity as critical methods for literary analysis.
These interests converge in her current research project which focuses on the emergence of African queer literature and politics through the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. The book fair was a preeminent destination for African literature and arts throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but it also became notorious for staging public debates around race and homosexuality. By examining how the book fair functioned as a contested site that codified the limits and possibilities of sexual freedom, the project also reconsiders what genres and spaces are imagined to be the foundational subjects of African literary studies and Black queer studies.
Madenga’s research has been supported by various fellowships and grants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research.
