This essay examines moments of Black women’s rhetorical impatience, or performances used to manage time within adverse conditions, to expand conceptions of kairos and self-care. It shows how disruption is a vehicle of discipline designed to promote Black women’s respect and wellness, revealing discursive postures that must inform discussions of identity, risk, and power in relation to rhetorical criticism and education.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

Tamika L. Carey , University at Albany – SUNY Enculturation : http://www.enculturation.net/rhetorical-healing-as-reeducation ( Published: January 16, 2013 ) In The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman’s Guide Through Life’s Dilemmas , motivational speaker, spiritual teacher, and self-help author Iyanla Vanzant describes one of her purposes for writing her best-selling 1996 book. She says: Black women do not understand there is no wrong in being human. There are only lessons. No matter how outlandish, ridiculous, or irresponsible our behavior may be at any given time, know, accept, love. There is nothing wrong with you. There is, however, always room for improvement and change… Self-knowledge is not about picking your scabs, beating up yourself, feeling bad about your wounds or weak spots. It means that you recognize you have them, make a commitment to nurture and strengthen them, and leave them alone to heal. (75) Such affirmations and calls for self-reflection are common features within the numerous African American self-help books and inspirational guides published for women since the nineties. The majority of these books “promise” to teach readers insights and strategies for overcoming the dis ease of past trauma or alleviating the dis content with challenges in their present lives. Readers and writers alike have found these self-help texts beneficial. For women like Brenda Sheffield, who claims that self-help books are “springboard[s] to discussing and healing [her] life and those of people [she] knows,” the benefit in reading them is learning, or re-learning, ways of being, knowing, or acting necessary for resuming one’s intended life path (Houser). For Vanzant, and other popular and profitable writers in this genre, activism is an incentive. Through writing books containing their testimonies, observations, and teachings, they pass on the ways of knowing they consider essential for the survival of their communities. Scholarship on self-help literature critiques…

The canonization of vocal African-American women scholars and activists is a trend that can obscure memory of their sophisticated persuasive techniques and political campaigns. Such has been the case with Geneva Smitherman, the noted sociolinguist and scholar activist. This essay analyzes the persuasive choices in a corpus of her earliest essays as a rhetorical campaign to situate her innovative use of antagonism and analysis within a tradition of African-American women scholars and activists who have used essay-writing as a means of sociopolitical action and to model a conceptual framework for understanding the complexity of their efforts.