Beyond Cultural Alienation: Rethinking the Omoluabi Neo-Absurdist’s Theatre of Intentionality Performance Aesthetics

Abstract

In certain recent critical interventions on the Nigerian theatre stage, Ojoniyi and others (2026, 2025, 2024, 2023a, 2021a, & 2021b) have raised issues around the Yoruba Omoluabi character philosophy as a performance theory and aesthetics. In the process, such concepts as neo-absurdism, self-of-selves, cultural conditioning, Omoluabi-intentionality of ego-mutilation and ego-inversion were freely used and engaged, perhaps as new tropes for the understanding of the motivations of/for the collective and individual’s cultural imagination of identity formation, action and counter actions generations against what may be seen as representing unspoken cultural alienation of the masses through the activities of few cultural hegemonies. As such, the identified tropes are essentially subtly deployed against what is seen as representing a foreclosed or assumed intransitive imagination of African culture that basically helps to sustain the said socio-cultural alienation of the common people in different cultural spaces. Reinterrogating the claims that culture is also a tool of socio-economic manipulation, class control and hegemonic privileging (Ojoniyi 2023b & 2021b) this paper reengages the concepts above as tropes for the deconstruction of the ideas of culture as an intransitive primordial existential legacy of the African past. It further argues that within certain contemporary developments and realities, many African cultural legacies of the past are no-longer relevant or functional. And, employing Ojoniyi’s dialectical-text-consciousness theory (2012 & 2013), it proposes a systemic understanding and appreciation of every socio-cultural text as a progressive and cumulative transitive consciousness/intentional text – in which there is no fixed or prima culture that cannot be challenged and deconstructed for the generation of new/progressive meanings.