Reading Disability in Nigerian Literature: Representation, Identity, and the Limits of Postcolonial Inclusion

This dissertation makes an original contribution to disability studies in literature by examining the representation of disability in Nigerian fiction, drama, and poetry across the postcolonial period, and developing a theoretical framework that situates disability representation within the specific cultural, religious, and postcolonial dynamics of Nigerian society. Disability studies has produced rich literary critical scholarship in North American and European contexts, but its application to African literature remains nascent, and the specific ideological traditions, both indigenous and colonial, that shape Nigerian cultural understandings of disability require a locally grounded rather than universalising theoretical approach. The dissertation constructs an original theoretical framework drawing on critical disability studies, postcolonial disability theory, Nigerian cultural studies, and the sociology of marginality, attending to the ways in which disability intersects with class, gender, and ethnic identity in Nigerian literary representation. The framework is applied to close readings of disability representation across a corpus of 25 Nigerian literary texts including novels, plays, and poetry collections from the 1960s to the present, examining how disability is constructed through character narrative, imagery, and the relationship between physical impairment and moral or spiritual meaning in different generic and historical contexts. Analysis traces the evolution from disability as symbolic otherness in early postcolonial fiction to more complex and identity-oriented disability representations in recent Nigerian literature. Original contributions include the Nigerian disability literary theory framework, a critical literary history of disability representation in Nigerian writing, and close readings of previously unanalysed texts. Keywords: disability studies, Nigerian literature, representation, postcolonial theory, cultural identity.