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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. What are yearning and mourning associated with in black culture according to Gilroy?

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

3. What were Richard Wright's politics?

4. How did Richard Wright want to present blacks in his books?

5. When did DuBois experience himself as a Negro for the first time?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was Richard Wright's feeling about white culture?

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

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

4. What does Gilroy say is the black relation with time?

5. What tension did politics create in black culture?

6. What are the three modes of thinking, seeing and being which DuBois says are the basis of double consciousness?

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Evaluate the proposition that race has been superseded by the more modern experience, shared across races, of power and powerlessness in terms of capital and labor.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.

Essay Topic 2

Write an evaluative review of The Black Atlantic. What is this book's place in culture? What are its uses? Who is its audience? What are its limitations?

Essay Topic 3

How do you think Gilroy would say that black experience in the black Atlantic differs from the Irish or the Catholics in America who are trying to keep a particular ethnic identity alive in a homogenizing culture that turns everyone into Americans insofar as they relinquish their ethnicity?

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This section contains 727 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample