View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Gilroy associate racial traditions with?
(a) Postmodernity.
(b) International modernism.
(c) Pre-modernity.
(d) Syncretic modernity.

2. What is the role of tradition in black culture according to Gilroy?
(a) It hides the differences between black experiences.
(b) It forms the basis for pan-Africanism.
(c) It asserts the kinship of cultural forms.
(d) It repairs the connection with Africa.

3. How does Gilroy say blacks are different from Jews?
(a) Blacks were never systematically exterminated.
(b) Blacks do not believe that they have a covenant with their god.
(c) Blacks do not have a homeland to return to.
(d) Blacks do not believe they all come from a common ancestor.

4. What does Gilroy say is the only way to deal with the history of slavery?
(a) To look it in the face.
(b) To live with what is in the present.
(c) To try to hide the past away.
(d) To dig into the past to find a personal origin in it.

5. What does The Souls of Black Folk say to white people according to Gilroy?
(a) It proposes that helping the blacks return to Africa is the best path for progress.
(b) It challenges their sense of color-coded civilization.
(c) It affirms the interrelationship between slavers and slaves.
(d) It establishes the intellectual credentials of the black races.

Short Answer Questions

1. What did Richard Wright want to deprive white people of?

2. What conflict was taking up too much space in the discussion of race in American literature according to Richard Wright?

3. What does Gilroy say blacks used to unify themselves?

4. What does Gilroy say is wrong with contemporary criticism of African-American literature?

5. What does Gilroy say Afrocentrism is really?

Short Essay Questions

1. What relation does Gilroy draw between the black Atlantic and the Holocaust?

2. What idea was undermined, in Richard Wright's mind, by the violence of modern American culture?

3. What was DuBois' relation with blackness?

4. What is the importance of the theme of love and loss in black popular arts, according to Gilroy?

5. How does Gilroy characterize the ontological state of slavery?

6. What does Gilroy say politics did for black culture?

7. In what way was capitalist culture a kind of crisis in itself, Wright?

8. How does blackness function in DuBois' writing, as Gilroy describes it?

9. Why, in Gilroy's opinion, is tradition useful in modern black culture?

10. Describe the pan-Africanism movement which Richard Wright was part of.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 794 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample