Ameh Dennis Akoh

This study (which is a book proposal) observes that of all the many critical works on Femi Osofisan as a renowned Nigerian dramatist, no single book has been devoted to his adapted plays. This study identifies him as the most prolific and adept in adaptation in Nigerian drama. Using the contextual and critical methods of analysis, the study thus takes a fresh look at the dramatic adaptations of Osofisan beyond the mere creative enterprise of transposition for the sake of meta-textual thematic universalism and argues that Osofisan’s dramatic adaptations fall strictly under the drama of postcolonial angst that not only interrogates received history but also received dramatic canons. His adaptations are, simply, not continuations of European models but revisions which we term here as counter discourses and which evidently pass as a postcolonial gaze in the Foucauldian sense where we see ourselves rather than how we are being seen.