For full symposium playlist, click here.
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
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.
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We will read Tamika Carey’s “Necessary Adjustments: Black Women’s Rhetorical Impatience” as our guiding framework.  ​
PictureClick on box above for a suggested background reading
More reading suggestions:
  1. "A Call to Political and Social Activism: The Jeremiadic Discourse of Maria Miller Stewart, 1831-1833" by Willie Harrell, Jr
  2.  "African American Rhetoric and the Profession" by Enrique Rigsby
  3. "Articulating the Heuristic Value of African American Communication Studies" by Eletra S. Gilchrist & Ronald L. Jackson II
  4.  "Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism" by Lisa A. Flores 
  5.  “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s): A Conversation for Naming and Claiming a Field of Study” by Ronisha Browdy
  6.  "The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept" by Karma R. Chávez
  7. "The Chain Remain the Same": Communicative Practices in the Hip Hop Nation” by Geneva Smitherman
  8. "Courting the Abject: A Taxonomy of Black Queer Rhetoric" by Collin Craig
  9. "Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric" by Jacqueline Jones Royster
  10. "Empowering Communities: Ella Baker’s Decentralized Leadership Style and Conversational Eloquence" by Joshua H. Miller
  11. "Functions of Freedom Singing in the Civil Rights Movement: The Activists' Implicit Rhetorical Theory" by Kerran L. Sanger 
  12. "'Good Speech': An Interpretive Essay Investigating an African Philosophy of Communication"  by Venita Kelley
  13. “Grace Jones, Afro Punk, and Other Fierce Provocations: An Introduction to ‘Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking” by Eric Pritchard
  14. "Here Is Something You Can't Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies" by Lisa B.Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez
  15. "I Bring Wreck to Those Who Disrespect Me Like a Dame: Women, Rap, and the Rhetoric of Wreck" (in Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere) by Gwendolyn Pough
  16. “It's Bigger than Comp/Rhet: Contested and Undisciplined” by Gwendolyn Pough
  17.  “Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Dialogue on ‘The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism” by Alexis McGee and J. David Cisneros
  18. “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe” by  Kristiana L. Báez and Ersula Ore
  19. “Sista Outsider: Queer Women of Color and Hip Hop” by Eric D. Pritchard and Maria Bibbs
  20. “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism” by Lisa A. Flores
  21. Transliminality: Black Transfemmes and the Limit of Visibility Politics” by Nathan Alexander Moore
  22. "'Tryna Free Kansas City': The Revolutions of Janelle Monáe as Digital Griot" by Cassandra Jones
  23. “Who are We Working for? Recentering Black Feminism” by Scarlett L. Hester and Catherine R. Squires 
  24. "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.
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