Storytelling as a Tool for Aesthetic Inquiry in Disability Arts

This paper examines how Nigerian disability arts use storytelling to redefine beauty and challenge social norms through two plays, Ẹni Òrìṣà and Disability Monologues. Drawing on Mitchell and Snyder’s idea of “narrative prosthesis,” Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness, and Siebers’ notion of “broken beauty,” it analyses how these works subvert traditions that frame disability as tragedy. Centring disabled characters as creative agents, the plays resist both local stigma and Western aesthetic hierarchies, reframing disability as a site of artistic and cultural innovation. Grounded in Yorùbá cosmology, the study reimagines beauty as an embrace of human variation. Through audience responses and performance analysis, it shows how these plays expand Nigerian theatre’s expressive range and articulate a non-Western contribution to global disability aesthetics.