Questions: Critical Race Theory and African American Literary Criticism
4 questions to test your understanding
Score: 0 / 4
Question 1 Multiple Choice
In which field did critical race theory first develop?
AClassical philology
BAmerican legal scholarship
CRussian formalist poetics
DLinguistic structuralism
CRT grew out of law schools in the 1970s and 1980s, in work by Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and others. Literary scholars later adopted its ideas.
Question 2 True / False
Critical race approaches to literature can be applied only to texts written by authors of color.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Race shapes texts by white authors as well. Morrison's Playing in the Dark analyzes how canonical white American fiction uses Black figures to define freedom, innocence and whiteness itself.
Question 3 Multiple Choice
In The Signifying Monkey (1988), what does Henry Louis Gates Jr. mean by 'Signifyin(g)' in African American literature?
AUsing footnotes to explain dialect
BRepetition with a difference: revising and commenting on earlier texts and forms, often with irony or parody
CAvoiding any reference to earlier writers
DWriting only in standard academic English
Gates draws the term from African American vernacular practice and from the trickster figure of the Signifying Monkey. He argues that Black writers revise one another, as Alice Walker's work answers Zora Neale Hurston's.
Question 4 Short Answer
Toni Morrison writes of an 'Africanist presence' in white American literature. Explain the idea and give an example of how a reader might use it.
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Morrison argues that Black characters and images, even when minor or silent, help white American writers define ideas such as freedom, innocence and selfhood. A reader might ask how Jim's enslavement in Huckleberry Finn gives meaning to Huck's sense of his own freedom.
The concept shifts attention from the presence or absence of Black authors to the structural work race does inside a text. It shows that race shapes American literature's central themes, not just its margins.