Module 4 Homework

Please respond to each of the following questions (approximately 250 words each). Please choose one question to answer at greater length (approximately 500 words). Answers should be thoughtful and demonstrate serious reflection on course readings and class discussion. Each short answer will be worth 10 points; the long answer will be worth 20 points.

1. The subtitle of Banjo is “A Story without a Plot.” What formal features of the novel support this subtitle? How does the “plotless” form of the novel correspond to the lives of the beach boys? What social and political significance does McKay give to their “plotless” living?

2. McKay was criticized, for both Home to Harlem and Banjo, for depicting blacks as always focused on drinking, sex, and fighting. How would you defend Banjo from this criticism? How and where does the novel go beyond stories of debauchery?

3. How do the concepts of “primitivism” and “civilization” function in Banjo? What do they refer to? Do they have stable meanings, and if not, what does McKay accomplish by complicating them?

4. How does prejudice work in Banjo? Where do we encounter it? How do the characters understand it? How does it affect their lives? What kind(s) of prejudice does the novel itself demonstrate? Do you think the novel is promoting or critiquing the ethnic identities that divide blacks?

5. What resonances do you find between Hughes's and McKay's writing about music? How does each writer describe the social connections music creates and the experiences it expresses? How do they each relate music to their own projects as writers (using it as a metaphor, for example, or as a foil)?

6. What does Césaire have to say about race politics in the U.S. in "Mississippi" and "The Tornado"?