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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. Where did Richard Wright develop his ideas about race?

2. How does Gilroy describe slavery?

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

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

5. What are the two parts of the double consciousness Gilroy describes?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What is the importance of the theme of love and loss in black popular arts, according to Gilroy?

3. What did DuBois argue was the only way to deal with the brutality of modern civilized life in the South?

4. What distinction does Gilroy say Richard Wright holds?

5. What tension did politics create in black culture?

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

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Who are Gilroy's opponents, and what are their views? How is Gilroy's book a form of resistance to their ideas? What are the stakes these intellectuals are contesting, and how do they hope to win them?

Essay Topic 2

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?

Essay Topic 3

What are we, the readers, supposed to do as a result of reading Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic? Does Gilroy propose plans of action, or is he merely informing us? How political is the act of reading The Black Atlantic?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 661 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample