Awkward confronts his demons head-on with clarity and candor. While it is jarring to see words like discursive and interrogate in expressions of the most personal, heartfelt feelings, there can be no doubt that in this memoir Awkward is lovingly attentive to his mother’s narratives-indeed, to his mother.” - Robert B. But his higher mission in his work with the author who is his mother. And while short, his remarks on authors including Morrison, Richard Wright, ntozake shange, Randall Kenan, and Paul Monette are fascinating precisely because Awkward’s mission is to tell us how their texts have burrowed into the inner reaches of his life.
Awkward has incisive things to say about the Million Man March, the black public intellectual, the infamous Benetton poster of a black woman nursing a (possibly) white child, the school cafeteria ‘black table’ (and other ‘Chocolate Cities’), and a host of other things we’ve all thought about, but not necessarily in print. “ Scenes of Instruction in an up-from-the-ghetto book, as some readers have observed, but that designation hardly does it justice.
AWKWARD CONVERSATIONS WITH A BLACK MAN BOOK PROFESSIONAL
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.īy 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. 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. 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. 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. Scenes of Instruction is the memoir of noted scholar of African American literature Michael Awkward. Labor and Working-Class History Association.Association for Middle East Women's Studies.Author Resources from University Presses.Permissions Information for Journal Authors.Journals fulfilled by DUP Journal Services.
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