Approximately 2500 words (8-10 double-spaced typed pages) in total
The exam consists of two parts. In part one, each short answer response should be about 1⁄2 to 1 page long. In part 2, your essay should be about 5-6 pages long. Please write in full sentences not in point form. When citing course texts, please put direct quotes from the readings in quotation marks and include in-text citations. You do not need to include a list of Works Cited at the end of your exam.
Part 1: Course Terms and Concepts
Short Answer Questions (5 x 5 = 25 marks)
Please select FIVE of the 10 terms below and provide a short definition of each. Explain A) the meaning of the term and how it is relevant to your study of black cultures and histories in the Americas; and B) how this term relates to a specific reading in this course.
1. Talented Tenth
2. Adultification
3. African Diaspora
4. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy
5. Mythical norm
6. Black Nationalism
7. Mammy Stereotype
8. Disrespectability politics
9. Prison Industrial Complex
10. Racial capitalism
Part 2: Major Course Themes Essay Question (25 marks)
Write an essay responding to ONE of the four questions below. In your response, please discuss the text quoted in the question in relation to four texts used in the course (the text referenced in the question can count as one of the four but it doesn’t have to). Of your four course texts, at least one must be from the Fall term and at least one from the Winter term. Texts may include course kit articles, slave narratives, novels, and films that have been assigned during the year. In your response, try to use a range of texts and engage a range of contexts.
1. bell hooks argues that “the ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. … In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating “awareness” politicizes ‘looking’ relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist” (“The Oppositional Gaze” 116). Discuss the idea of the ‘oppositional gaze,’ and show how this idea can be applied to your reading of four texts from this course: at least one should be from the Fall term and one from the Winter term. In your answer you can also think about and explore the ways in which you might have learned to read/see/think about the world though an oppositional gaze this year.
2. Writing about slavery in the Americas, G.K. Lewis argues that “the daily job of living did not end with enslavement, and the slaves created over time, viable patterns of life and thought, for which their pasts were pools of available symbolic and material resources” (“The Antislavery Ideology” 172). Arguably, this project continues for Black communities in the Americas to the present day. Trace the ways in which four texts on the course propose “viable patterns of life and thought” for black people and communities in the Americas. You can think about the possibilities of life and thought as articulated in fictional texts, nonfiction essays/speeches in the course kit and/or slave narratives. At least one text you examine should be from the Fall term and one text from the Winter term.
3. Stuart Hall, in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” argues that “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context,’ positioned” (222). Various writers on the course have explored various positionalities and how they intersect: race, gender, class, sexuality, etc. Explore these intersections in relation to four texts: at least one should be from the Fall term and one from the Winter term.
4. Robin Kelley, in “Beyond the ‘Real World’: Why Black Radicals Need to Wake up and Start Dreaming,” observes that “activists produce new knowledge and open new vistas for inquiry” (55). Explore the activism of four thinkers/writers you have encountered on the course. How have their actions, thinking, ideas, and/or creative work offered new ways of engaging in practices of Black freedom and liberation? How have these thinkers/writers encouraged you to understand resistance in complex ways? At least one text you examine should be from the Fall term and one from the Winter term.
Part 3: OPTIONAL BONUS QUESTION
What is the most important thing you learned in HUMA 1300 this year?
If you write a 1 page reflection in response to this question, you will receive 3 bonus marks on your finale exam grade. There is no right answer to this question. You can reflect on the course material, on your responses to the course material, on what you learned about the writing process, or the bonus point events, or anything that particularly resonated for you.