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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who does Gilroy say DuBois was analyzing in The Souls of Black Folk?

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

3. How does Gilroy characterize the third mode of double consciousness?

4. When was the journal 'Presence Africaine' published?

5. What does Gilroy say the Holocaust should help us see?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. Describe the role of the concept of tradition in the black Atlantic.

4. What did DuBois conclude from his observations of black culture?

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

6. What does Gilroy have to say about violence in American culture?

7. What, in Gilroy's account, was Richard Wright's thinking about racial identity?

8. Why was Wright criticized for his characterizations, according to Gilroy?

9. What tension did politics create in black culture?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

At the end of The Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy describes the challenges facing Western culture in the future. How is race related to these challenges, and do you think that this broadening of scope is a fitting gesture to close on? Does it cement Gilroy's narrative, or does it step aside from it?

Essay Topic 2

Gilroy proposes black music as a model of a cultural form that gives people courage to live with the contradictions and negotiations of racial life. In what way is Gilroy's book itself musical?

Essay Topic 3

Evaluate the proposition that race has been superseded by the more modern experience, shared across races, of power and powerlessness in terms of capital and labor. Which is to say that powerless poor people have more in common than people of the same race but different classes.

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This section contains 719 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample