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Overview
Scenes of Instruction is the memoir of noted scholar of African American literature Michael Awkward. Structured around the commencement ceremonies that marked his graduations from various schools, it presents Awkward’s coming-of-age as a bookish black male in the projects of 1970s Philadelphia. His relationships with his family and peers, their struggles with poverty and addiction, and his eventual move from underfunded urban schools to a prestigious private school all become parts of a memorable script.
With a recurring focus on how his mother’s tragic weaknesses and her compelling strengths affected his development, Awkward intersperses the chronologically arranged autobiographical sections with ruminations on his own interests in literary and cultural criticism. As a male scholar who has come under fire for describing himself as a feminist critic, he reflects on such issues as identity politics and the politics of academia, affirmative action, and the Million Man March.
By connecting his personal experiences with larger political, cultural, and professional questions, Awkward uses his life as a palette on which to blend equations of race and reading, urbanity and mutilation, alcoholism, pain, gender, learning, sex, literature, and love.
Editorials
From the Publisher
“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
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. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Erik Bledsoe
The academic is surely one of the least likely suspects to participate in the recent vogue of memoir writing. One would think that the long hours spent in libraries required to earn a Ph.D. and become a professor would not provide enough personal material to hold a reader's interest. Nevertheless, enough academics have produced memoirs that their work arguably constitutes a subgenre. Notably, the most famous examples of the work have been by women and African Americans, often detailing the obstacles they faced as they climbed into the so-called Ivory (i.e., white male) Tower.In Scenes of Instruction, Awkward details his assent from the projects of Philadelphia in the 1970s, to his position at the University of Michigan where he was granted early tenure and his current position at the University of Pennsylvania, where what should have been a celebratory triumphant return of a native son was marred by controversy and the bittersweet memories of his deceased mother. Awkward has endured a fair amount of criticism because in his academic work he posits himself as a feminist scholar. Much of Scenes of Instruction is dedicated to demonstrating how a young black male can develop feminist concerns while living with an alcoholic mother who was severely abused by Awkward's father. He also details his internal conflicts with living up to the standards of inner-city black masculinity. The sections of the book that reveal Awkward's sometimes agonizing personal struggles with identity are by far the most interesting.
Much of the book, however, is devoted to personal feuds. He devotes several pages to criticizing an ex-girlfriend's poetry and musical performances. In a moment that will surely be controversial in some circles, Awkward attacks black intellectuals Michael Dyson, Gerald Early and bell hooks for producing works of limited scholarly utility, pandering to popular white audiences and lacking intellectual integrity. To establish his own credibility, he includes long sections of critical analysis of Richard Wright and other African American writers, complete with the jargon-ridden prose that is too often typical of that discipline.
Awkward's book is likely to appeal mostly to other academics.
—Foreword