References to time and fatigue appear consistently throughout historical forms of African American public oratory and literature, as well as in Black vernacular and digital culture. More than pithy soundbites or hashtags, these references circulate within and beyond these communities, often reflecting a speaker or commentator’s awareness of acts of acceleration or deceleration.
In a lecture titled “Time and Time Again: On the Rhetorical Work of African American Impatience,” Tamika L. Carey will explore how discourses of impatience, or performances shaped by time and fatigue, operate as strategic forms of disruption that indicate instructional modes of activism and self-care African Americans use to protect and advance their quality of life.
Carey is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher. She is the author of Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood (SUNY 2016), a project that earned her the 2019 Inaugural Book Series Scholar Award by DBLAC. She has also published articles in such venues as Rhetoric Review, Enculturation, Signs, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly on Black women’s intellectual and writing practices. She is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia.
Carey’s lecture will take place Friday, Nov. 20, at 3:15 p.m. (EST) via Zoom. This event is sponsored by CWRU Department of English, in partnership with the Committee on Black Lives Matter and Antiracism.