Performance Studies and the Everyday: Ritual, Play, and Performativity in Urban Nigerian Life

This dissertation extends performance studies frameworks to the analysis of performative dimensions of everyday life in urban Nigerian contexts, investigating how ritual, play, and performativity shape social interaction, identity negotiation, and power enactment in contemporary Nigerian cities. Performance studies, as developed by Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, and Erving Goffman, has theorised the performative dimension of everyday social life, but the application of these frameworks to African urban contexts has been limited by the cultural specificity of the theories and the absence of substantial empirical grounding in African urban ethnography. This research undertakes extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Lagos, Kano, and Enugu, documenting and analysing performative events including street markets, religious gatherings, political rallies, naming ceremonies, and social media self-presentation, through the lens of performance theory. The dissertation develops an original analytical framework termed urban performance ecology, which accounts for the interconnected performative systems operating within and across different social domains in Nigerian cities. An original theoretical contribution is the dissertation's argument that Nigerian urban performativity is characterised by a distinctive tension between masking and revelation as social strategies. Keywords: performance studies, everyday life, urban Nigeria, performativity, social ritual.