Common sense, uncommon sense: Tejumola Olaniyan in the theorization of African postcolonial Drama

Abstract

This paper engages Tejumola Olaniyan’s “Femi Osofisan: The Form of Uncommon Sense.” The essay in question undertakes a reading of a representative selection from the corpus of Femi Osofisan’s plays, employing the theory of uncommon sense which Olaniyan himself formulated. Olaniyan projects uncommon sense as a reflection on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of common sense put forward in his Selections from Prison Notes. He presents it as a new dimension of contemplation which explores new possibilities and unsettles old conclusions. To prove his position that Osofisan’s plays represent the form of uncommon sense, Olaniyan rifles through the playwright’s oeuvre and produces detailed readings of some of the works using the theory. I undertake three main tasks in this paper. First, I evaluate the accuracy of the positions taken by Olaniyan on some of the plays of Osofisan that he investigates using the theory of uncommon sense. Second, while affirming that uncommon sense as formulated by Olaniyan is seminal, I try to see whether it is not possible to re-constitute this principle around the notion of cultural hegemony that Gramsci is best known for. Finally, I attempt an application of the reconfigured theory in the analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa