Rhetorics of impatience are performances of frustration or dismissal and time-based arguments that reflect or pursue haste for the purpose of discipline. Enacted through bodily, tonal, and verbal indicators and arguments of exasperation or displeasure, they reveal how rhetors perceive self and community interpretive mandates or black feminist/womanist ethics. They reflect knowledge making traditions and discursive practices that, among Black women, involve “talking back,” “turning it out” and “calling a thing a thing,” or radical truth-telling, and they reveal a distrust of circular discussion, deflection, or distraction. These rhetorics foreground the assumption that equity and justice for one’s self, Black women, and Black communities is already overdue and, thus, requires speed and decisive action.
~Tamika Carey
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Carey’s frame of “rhetorical impatience” guides our thinking here. We look closely at the Black feminist rhetors Carey asks us to pay attention to. We will also look at the ways that Black feminist scholar-activists, like Carey herself, as well as anti-racist/intersectional rhetoric scholars enact their own rhetorical agency through rhetorical impatience in and against white obsessions with Aristotelian/European traditions.
We will read Tamika Carey’s “Necessary Adjustments: Black Women’s Rhetorical Impatience” as our guiding framework.
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More reading suggestions:
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- "Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework" by Moya Bailey in Gender and Society (2018)
To Cite This Page:
Kynard, Carmen and Eric Darnell Pritchard. "'Rhetorical Impatience': The Rhetorical Interruptions of Black Feminisms." Tracing the Stream, August 2022, https://www.tracingthestream.com/rhetorical-impatience-the-rhetorical-interruptions-of-black-feminisms.html.
Kynard, Carmen and Eric Darnell Pritchard. "'Rhetorical Impatience': The Rhetorical Interruptions of Black Feminisms." Tracing the Stream, August 2022, https://www.tracingthestream.com/rhetorical-impatience-the-rhetorical-interruptions-of-black-feminisms.html.