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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What do Jews and blacks fear from a discussion of the Holocaust and slavery?
(a) Loss of uniqueness.
(b) The lack of evidence from their familial histories.
(c) Confronting all the things that cannot be known.
(d) Remembering.

2. What does Gilroy say the Holocaust should help us see?
(a) The murderous potential in technology.
(b) The numbness to human suffering that comes from modernism.
(c) The limits of rationality.
(d) The destructive potential of bureaucracies.

3. How does Gilroy say that Richard Wright saw capitalism?
(a) As a destructive war.
(b) As a great liberator.
(c) As a messianic religion.
(d) As a form of liberation theology.

4. What does Gilroy say Afrocentrism is really?
(a) Proletarianism.
(b) Americocentrism.
(c) Ethnicity protecting its flanks.
(d) Internationalism.

5. What horrified Richard Wright in Gilroy's account?
(a) Europeans taking his books as true indications of life in America.
(b) The history of blacks in America.
(c) Blacks criticizing his characters.
(d) Whites identifying with his black characters.

6. When did DuBois experience himself as a Negro for the first time?
(a) When he asked to vote.
(b) In early childhood.
(c) Listening to the Fisk University Jubilee Singers.
(d) When he bought another man's freedom.

7. What idea does Gilroy see at work in DuBois' novel Dark Princess?
(a) Miscegenation.
(b) Exogamy.
(c) Inbreeding.
(d) Racial heterogeneity.

8. What theory culminated in the Holocaust?
(a) Eugenics.
(b) Evolution.
(c) Messianic theology.
(d) Egalitarianism.

9. What does Gilroy say blacks used to unify themselves?
(a) Literature.
(b) Art.
(c) A political agenda.
(d) Music.

10. What heresy did Richard Wright commit, in Gilroy's account?
(a) Saying that blacks really were inferior to whites, in certain cases.
(b) Saying that black liberation was impossible, because the self is an endless war against itself.
(c) Saying that history would repeat itself with slavery.
(d) Saying that blacks shared responsibility for their situation.

11. What is the effect of turning toward tradition in Gilroy's account?
(a) Slavery becomes a cultural asset.
(b) Slavery gets repossessed.
(c) Slavery comes into focus as a foundational catastrophe.
(d) Slavery becomes more remote.

12. What was private violence connected to in Richard Wright's account?
(a) Public violence.
(b) Capitalism.
(c) Human nature.
(d) Slavery.

13. How did DuBois' birthplace affect his identity?
(a) He felt inauthentically black because he was not born in the south.
(b) He felt aloof from American race politics because he was born in England.
(c) He felt like a spokesman for his race because he was born among them in the south.
(d) He felt genuinely black because he was born in Africa.

14. What are yearning and mourning associated with in black culture according to Gilroy?
(a) Revenge and nostalgia for home.
(b) Exile and terror.
(c) Anomie and world-weariness.
(d) Disorientation and displacement.

15. Cornel West used DuBois' work as a solution to a crisis in what?
(a) Confidence in modernism.
(b) International Marxism.
(c) American literature.
(d) American pragmatism.

Short Answer Questions

1. What feeling does Gilroy say forms the foundation of the black Atlantic?

2. What term did James Weldon Johnson use for blacks in The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man?

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

4. How does Gilroy say blacks are different from Jews?

5. What does Gilroy say we should accept as inescapable?

(see the answer keys)

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