120:

• Explain:  "In one sense, not even legal manumission was of more importance to the slave community's status in Western culture than was the negation of the image of the black as an absence" (120).
• Explain:  "Just as the ex-slaves  wrote to end slavery, so too did free black authors write to redress the myriad forms that the fluid mask of racism assumed between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Jazz Age" (120).

• Explain:  "Zora Neale Hurston's revision of Frederick Douglass's apostrophe, [sic] to the ships . . . is only one example of many such instances of a black textual grounding through revision"(121).
• Explain:  For Hurston, " a woman . . . represents desire metaphorically, rather than metonymically, by controlling the process of memory" (121).
• Explain:  "Joe Starks, her most oppressive husband, . . . is a master of metonym, an opposition which Janie must navigate her selves through to achieve self-knowledge" (121)
• Provide one example of the metonyms Gates refers to here.

• Explain the two historical components of the debate about "the register of the black voice" (122).

123:

• What focus for African American writers did Frances E. W. Harper advocate for in 1861?

• Explain:  "Hurston's very rhetorical strategy, her invention of what I have chosen to call the speakerly text, seems designed to mediate between . . . a profoundly lyrical, densely metaphorical, quasi-musical, privileged black oral tradition on the one hand, and a received but not yet fully appropriated standard English literary tradition on the other hand" (124).

• What claim does the anonymous woman from Philadelphia make in 1886? How does Gates view this claim?
  

• Explain:  "We tend to forget how startling was Dunbar's use of black dialect as the basis of a poetic diction.  After all, by 1895, dialect had come to connote black innate mental inferiority,  the linguistic sign both of human bondage (as origin) and of the continued failure of 'improvability' or 'progress'" (127).

• Explain:  "How the black writer represented, and what he or she represented, were now indissolubly linked in black aesthetic theory" (128).

130:

• What, according to Gates, is the significance of Sterling Brown's Southern Road (1932)?
• What, according to Gates, is the significance of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923)?

131:

• Explain: "the oral voice in Cane is a motivated sign of duality, of opposition" (131).
• What, for Du Bois,  was Cane's "significant breakthrough" (131)?

132-33:

• Summarize the essence of George S. Schuyler's "Instructions for Contributors" in 1929.
• What does the existence of these instructions, according to Gates, suggest about Hurston's accomplishments in Their Eyes Were Watching God?