African Tragedy and the Question of Catharsis: Theorising Emotional Transformation in Nigerian Dramatic Experience

This dissertation interrogates the applicability and adequacy of Aristotelian catharsis as a theoretical framework for understanding emotional transformation in Nigerian dramatic experience, and proposes an original African tragic theory grounded in the philosophical and cultural specifics of Nigerian performance traditions. The concept of catharsis has dominated Western tragic theory for two millennia, yet its cultural assumptions about individual psychology, emotional purgation, and the relationship between suffering and social order differ fundamentally from the emotional and communal dynamics of Nigerian tragic performance. The research examines the emotional epistemologies embedded in Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa tragic performance traditions through extensive ethnographic engagement with traditional ritual performances, community elders, and performance scholars across six geopolitical zones. Dramatic text analysis supplements ethnographic findings. The dissertation develops an original theoretical framework of communal resonance as an alternative to catharsis, proposing that Nigerian tragic performance achieves emotional transformation through mechanisms of collective reverberation, ancestral invocation, and communal moral reckoning that operate on the community rather than the individual as the primary recipient of tragic effect. This framework constitutes the dissertation's principal original theoretical contribution to comparative tragic theory. Keywords: African tragedy, catharsis, communal resonance, Nigerian dramatic theory, emotional transformation.