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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What did the struggle for black autonomy involve, for DuBois?
(a) Entrepreneurship.
(b) Blacks helping blacks.
(c) Returning to black roots.
(d) Social construction.

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

3. What feeling did DuBois see in the culture of diaspora blacks?
(a) Ambivalence about modernity.
(b) Anger for being taken into exile.
(c) Longing for the apocalypse.
(d) Resentment of progress.

4. What does Gilroy say Richard Wright was criticized for?
(a) Hatred of women.
(b) Writing misogynistic male characters.
(c) Failing to write about specifically American concerns.
(d) Writing men and women who are victims of the capitalist system.

5. What did DuBois say was a central feature of slave culture?
(a) Communalism.
(b) Terror.
(c) Profit.
(d) Productivity.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the first period of black history, according to DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk?

2. What are blacks asked to remember instead of slavery?

3. What does Gilroy say DuBois often reminded blacks?

4. Why would blacks be urged to forget slavery?

5. What did DuBois believe in that Richard Wright did not believe in according to Gilroy?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Gilroy say DuBois reminded blacks?

2. What tension did politics create in black culture?

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

4. How does Gilroy say the discussion he has had in 'Black Atlantic' is likely to help in the twenty-first century, when Western culture faces challenges over resources and sustainability?

5. How does Gilroy say DuBois described black music?

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

7. What was James Weldon Johnson's contribution to Gilroy's book?

8. Why do Jews and blacks both resist the comparison of slavery and the Holocaust, as Gilroy describes it?

9. What is the relationship between black and Jewish cultures, as Gilroy defines it?

10. What were Richard Wright's politics?

(see the answer keys)

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