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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 does Gilroy say about racial traditions?

2. Why should blacks openly recognize the debt of their cultural language?

3. What does tradition signify in black culture according to Gilroy?

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

5. What does the concept of the diaspora help with in Gilroy's opinion?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What view of the black Atlantic does Paul Gilroy leave us with at the end of the book?

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

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

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

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

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

8. What origin legitimized Richard Wright in readers' eyes?

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is the relationship between race and nationality according to Gilroy? What was it originally and what has it become? How has it changed over time? What changed it?

Essay Topic 2

Is Gilroy writing about the black experience, or the modern experience? If the modern self is a fragmented self, do all individuals with self-awareness experience the same double-consciousness? How does Gilroy avoid this universalizing argument, which erases blackness as it universalizes aspects of black consciousness.

Essay Topic 3

Where is the climax of this book? Are there different climaxes? What questions does each climax resolve? What questions does each climax leave unanswered?

(see the answer keys)

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