VISUAL LITERATURE AND EMERGENT PARADIGMS IN POST-OSOFISAN NIGERIAN SCREEN THEATRE

Abstract

When Irele (1981), in his critical x-ray of modern African literature, summed it up as a form of response to those events and forces whose impact upon our societies have determined their present state and course of historical development but also as a means of entering more fully into their meaning and implications for our (African) lives (69), he might have been predicting the revolution that catalyzed a few years later in the annals of modern Nigerian dramatic literature. Sharing Irele's contention about our modern literature, it can be argued that the evolution of the generation which came on the heels of Femi Osofisan aligns with the motive power of drama, which De Graft (1976:5, 22) sees as a perennial search, a reaching out by the whole man, towards the goal of sanity and security in a world that threatens annihilation, from all directions. Going further, De Graft advocates an understanding of the new forces that threaten our society, the things that hold terror as well as joy for our people, the need to create new or more compellingly relevant themes. This paper is an examination and a critique of the evolution of a new generation of Nigerian playwrights the post-Osofisan generation orientation, thematic concerns and aesthetic contributions to a growing corpus of work otherwise known as visual literature and their the emergent paradigms of the screen theatre.