Directions: Please answer as fully as possible the following questions. Each answer requires at least two paragraphs. In your answers, you must provide full citation for the sources that you employ in your answers. This exam will be due on December 12, 2014 by 5pm. You are to either upload it to Blackboard or provide a hard copy to my office in Founders 337. Do not email this exam.
1. What are the similarities between W.E.B. Du Bois's idea of "conserving race" and Vincent Harding's notion of a "vocation of the Black scholar?" What do these concepts require of scholars of Africana Studies? Give examples.
2. Greg Carr discusses the crisis and a question impinging upon Africana Studies intellectuals' ability to sustain a productive approach to understanding Africana experiences. In what ways do this crisis and the question(s) it generate(s) affect the vocation of Black scholarship today? Provide examples from either the text or your own analysis based on Carr's characterization.
3. What was the significance of the Amenia II conference? According to Jonathan Scott Holloway, what separated the ideological approaches of the younger intellectuals from the older crop? Explore the dynamics of their positions.
4. How does Holloway characterize the significance of the contexts (Washington, DC and Howard University) that shaped the development of Black scholarship in the 1930s and 1940s.
5. List the academic disciplines that Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche engaged. What were the unique insights that they provided about these subjects and how did their work challenge the prevailing attitudes in these arenas?
6. Compare and contrast how Ralph Bunche and Abram Harris understood the economic and political foundations of race.
7. Develop an analysis of E. Franklin Frazier's legacy by discussing how it may be seen as fulfilling Vincent Harding's "vocation." Does Frazier embody the kind of scholar that Harding sought in all Black scholars? How does this jibe with Holloway's analysis of Frazier as a "lost soul?"
8. Martha Biondi argues that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) provided the initial setting for Black student activism. Why would a movement to alter Black participation in higher education settings begin at essentially all-Black institutions? What were the student's agenda? In what ways did they accomplish their objectives?
9. At Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs), Black students entered with a certain level of consciousness about the Black condition. Explore how they were able to uniquely identify initiatives that would make their education in these universities relevant to addressing the conditions of their communities. What were the forces that made this possible?
10. What is the Black perspective? How does it affect the production of knowledge? What is its role in the development of Black/Africana Studies? How has it fared? Provide examples.
Bonus: How has the counterrevolution of Black Studies shaped the current status of Blacks in higher education?