The Convert

Danai Gurira author Aviva Neff editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:19th Sep '24

Should be back in stock very soon

The Convert cover

This Student Edition ofDanai Gurira's 2012 play The Convert includes a commentary by Aviva Neff, which delves into the play's themes of colonialism, enslavement, women's rights and gendered hierarchies.

It's 1896 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Jekesai, a young Shona girl, escapes a forced arranged marriage by converting to Christianity and becoming a protégé to an African Evangelical. As anti-colonial sentiments spread throughout the native population, Jekesai is forced to choose between her family's traditions and her newfound faith.

This Student Edition of Danai Gurira's 2012 play The Convert includes a commentary by Aviva Neff.

A work considering questions of racial, political and religious identity and assimilation with a provocative intelligence -- Mark Lawson * Guardian *
Ms. Gurira ... chronicles the human cost of this turbulent history with impressive clarity and thoroughness ... Of course, [she] has the perspective of a hundred and more years of history to draw on in dramatizing the moral and ethical issues involved in the missionary impulse, and its alliance with the forces of colonization. It is to her credit that she rarely allows The Convert to devolve into an admonishing tract. There is sympathy in her depiction of all the play’s characters, who cannot see how powerless they are to control their own fates. Believers in the old ways or adherents of the new, they are united in being caught in the grip of forces larger than themselves. -- Charles Isherwood * New York Times *

ISBN: 9781350366275

Dimensions: 196mm x 128mm x 10mm

Weight: 122g

120 pages