Scenes of Instruction - CL

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.)