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Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir

Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir


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About the Book

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.



Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Author's Note
Awkward Silences
Introduction: "Don't Be Like Your Father"
Section I: The Mother's Mark
Section II: " Are You Man Enough?"
Section III: "Chocolate City
Section IV: "close in silence"
Section V: "The Mother's Breast"
Coda: Tippin' In
Works Cited or Consulted

About the Author :

Michael Awkward is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His previous books include Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality and Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels.



Review :
"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 "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 brutalising 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 "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


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9780822324027
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Duke University Press
  • Language: English
  • No of Pages: 277
  • Weight: 617 gr
  • ISBN-10: 0822324024
  • Publisher Date: 22 Dec 1999
  • Binding: Hardback
  • No of Pages: 277
  • Sub Title: A Memoir


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