From Publishers Weekly
In this absorbing "autocritography" ("an account of individual, social, and institutional conditions that help produce a scholar"), Awkward, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, turns his early years inside out looking for clues to his youthful confusion about race, class, gender and sex. Raised amid harsh poverty in Philadelphia, he struggles with the emotional aftermath of his father's sudden disappearance after years of knocking Awkward's mother around and terrorizing young Awkward and his three small siblings. The effects of the author's traumatic family life were compounded by a life-altering event when he was a tot, in which Awkward accidentally pulled a red-hot cast-iron skillet upon his head, causing serious burns that marked him both physically and emotionally. Wisely, Awkward confronts his demons head-on with clarity and candor. However, he occasionally retreats from his gutsy revelations with verbose investigations of classic works of African-American fiction such as The Bluest Eye and Black Boy, which he uses to expand his musings on his life. The author of a book on black female novelists and an interpreter of black male feminism, Awkward acknowledges that many will resist his antipatriarchal stance, but he continues to press for "the dismantling of the phallocentric rule by which black females and... countless other Afro-American sons have been injuriously 'touched.' " Only after both parents died was Awkward able to put their flaws in perspective and to understand the core issues that drive this tangled yet appealing memoir. 22 b&w photos.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Scenes of Instruction marks an important contribution to various subgenres of memoir. Awkward gives insights on what it means to make the radical cultural shift from black economic poverty to the brutalizing world of extreme white privilege. He crosses from one shore to another (a remarkable cultural journey, presented here with intelligence and sensitivity), and generously allows the reader to understand what that crossing costs, on any number of levels.”—Cathy Davidson, author of 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan
“Each page of this book is filled with significance, each page a work of art. Awkward revisits his past from multiple perspectives—through his own body as a child or teen, and in a kind of outer body experience as a scholar reflecting on why things happened the way they did. Scenes of Instruction is one of those rare memoirs that will last a long time.”— Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America about.]
“This account of the education of Michael Awkward is tender, thoughtful, and illuminating. Scenes of Instruction is a great autobiographical achievement.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“Unafraid of his own brilliance, Michael Awkward has given us a penetrating portrait of the growth of an intellectual, of a man, and of an African American. He uses his honesty to illuminate the wounds into which his keen intelligence slices, and his invaluable insights are a balm toward understanding. In dealing with blackness and gender and double-consciousness and class, Scenes of Instruction goes to the hearts of the matter.”—Randall Kenan, author of Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
