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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Gilroy defend Richard Wright against charges of sexism?
(a) By arguing that Wright was insightful into the sexist nature of black experience.
(b) By analyzing female characters in Wright's minor novels.
(c) By saying that Wright's main characters are often sympathetic with women.
(d) By describing the role of women in Wright's life.

2. What ontological state does Gilroy say is the heart of many stories in black culture?
(a) The state of longing for self-expression and fulfillment.
(b) The state of being in pain.
(c) The state of displacement from the self.
(d) The state of nostalgia for home.

3. What does Gilroy say about racial traditions?
(a) They are endangered throughout the world, not just in the black Atlantic.
(b) They are the source of all opposition to modernity.
(c) We cannot recover them once they are lost.
(d) We can regain them if they are still practiced somewhere.

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

5. What does the Holocaust help us understood according to Gilroy?
(a) The black experience.
(b) Emotional indifference to suffering.
(c) Genocidal terror.
(d) Tolerance of cultural differences.

6. The second mode of double consciousness portrays blacks as what?
(a) Homeless.
(b) Wandering for a time.
(c) A prophecy of a homeland.
(d) A home unto himself.

7. What does The Souls of Black Folk say to white people according to Gilroy?
(a) It challenges their sense of color-coded civilization.
(b) It affirms the interrelationship between slavers and slaves.
(c) It proposes that helping the blacks return to Africa is the best path for progress.
(d) It establishes the intellectual credentials of the black races.

8. What does Gilroy say tradition helps to do with regard to slavery?
(a) Transform its legacy.
(b) Revise its effects.
(c) Avoid its memory.
(d) Cauterize its pain.

9. What does music represent, according to Gilroy?
(a) Pre-discursive elements in black experience.
(b) The ongoing struggle against modernity.
(c) The essence of black culture.
(d) The conflict between literacy and experience.

10. What does Gilroy say was a formative influence on black culture in Richard Wright's works?
(a) Common privation.
(b) Individualism.
(c) Self-reliance.
(d) Capitalism.

11. What conflict was taking up too much space in the discussion of race in American literature according to Richard Wright?
(a) The conflict between man and technology.
(b) The conflict between men and women.
(c) The conflict between owners and workers.
(d) The conflict between young and old.

12. Why should blacks openly recognize the debt of their cultural language?
(a) To accept their place in Western civilization.
(b) To make peaceful relations with Jews.
(c) To recognize that their culture is part of a larger cultural development.
(d) To build bridges to white culture.

13. What does Gilroy associate racial traditions with?
(a) International modernism.
(b) Pre-modernity.
(c) Syncretic modernity.
(d) Postmodernity.

14. What does Gilroy say Richard Wright was ambivalent to?
(a) A closed racial community.
(b) Reconciliation with white culture.
(c) Assimilation.
(d) Harmonious coexistence with dominant culture.

15. What term did James Weldon Johnson use for blacks in The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man?
(a) 'Urban-cosmopolitan'.
(b) 'Schizophrenic'.
(c) 'King of the kingdom of culture'.
(d) 'Dual personality'.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was private violence connected to in Richard Wright's account?

2. What ideology was Richard Wright ambivalent to according to Gilroy?

3. How does Gilroy describe slavery?

4. What does Gilroy say we should discuss?

5. What theory culminated in the Holocaust?

(see the answer keys)

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