| 1. Analyze Marita Bonner’s concern with black (female) identity by comparing and contrasting her ideologies of African American identity and womanhood. |
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| 2. Read Bonner’s “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored.” Consider the roles and depictions of men and women authors and characters during the Harlem Renaissance. What arguments about black women’s power does Bonner assert? What challenges to black women’s power does Bonner illuminate? |
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| 3. Study Sterling A. Brown’s poem “Strong Men” by examining the poet’s diction. Focus especially on the verbs applied to “strong men.” What theories of masculinity do they invoke? |
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| 4. Analyze Brown’s use of black vernacular dialect to explain how he crafts a highly credible narrative voice. What rhetorical devices does he deploy to achieve this effect? |
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| 5. Analyze Jessie Redmon Fauset’s interest in African American familial relationships (especially among black women) by creating a diagram of the relationships between the members of the Murray family. |
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| 6. Examine the lyric forms, instances of irony, and patterns of imagery in one of Angelina Weld Grimké’s poems. How do these rhetorical features advance the major theme(s) of this particular poem? |
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| 7. Analyze Grimke’s use of rhetorical questions. How do these questions enrich her poems? |
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| 8. To better comprehend Helene Johnson’s theme of African American beauty in her poetry, examine her use of adjectives and nouns in one of her poems. |
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| 9. Explore the extent to which Larsen constructs Helga’s passing for white as an identity crisis by analyzing Nella Larsen’s implicit definitions of double consciousness and belonging in the excerpt in the anthology from Quicksand. |
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| 10. Characterize the tone of Claude McKay’s writings in the anthology. To what extent to they argue against racial prejudice and racial conflict? To what extent do they argue for black separatism? |
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| 11. How does McKay manipulate the sonnet form? How are his sonnets distinctly different from traditional sonnets? |
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| 12. Evaluate Schuyler’s argument that there are no substantial differences between African American art and white art. To what extent are you persuaded by his argument? |
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| 13. What importance did Schomburg place on chronicling African American history? According to his essay, why was history-making an important endeavor for early twentieth-century U.S. blacks? |
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