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Papers by Tamika L. Carey

SUNY Press eBooks, Sep 30, 2016

This dissertation examines three sites within the recent discourse on healing that has emerged in... more This dissertation examines three sites within the recent discourse on healing that has emerged in the Black community to analyze the choices African American writers make when interpreting and responding to individual and community crises. Since the end of the Black women's ...

Rhetoric Review, 2020

This essay examines moments of Black women’s rhetorical impatience, or performances used to manag... more 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.

Ms. Magazine, 2020

A brief discussion on the rich mentoring opportunities afforded through teaching Toni Morrison's ... more A brief discussion on the rich mentoring opportunities afforded through teaching Toni Morrison's writing.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2018

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of... more 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.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society., Jun 4, 2014

The unparalleled commercial sucessess that gospel-playwright-turned-screenwriter Tyler Perry has ... more The unparalleled commercial sucessess that gospel-playwright-turned-screenwriter Tyler Perry has attained through converting his stage plays into films that depict black women overcoming personal crises raises questions about the intent behind his seemingly feminist-inspired representations of black womanhood. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of healing in Perry’s first two films, this essay reveals one of the suppressive pedagogical functions of Perry’s representation of black womanhood. Rhetorics of healing are a series of persuasive messages, performances, and literacy acts that writers deploy in order to convince readers that redressing or preventing crises requires them to follow the curriculum for ideological, communicative, and behavioral transformation that the writer considers essential to wellness. In Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion, Perry’s representation of rhetorical healing constructs black Christian women as students who must learn prescribed attitudes and behaviors to achieve, or remain in, states of wellness, and these lessons reinforce conservative gender ideologies and reify patriarchal constructions of the family and home. Given black women’s historically tenuous relationships with representations of themselves and their families in mainstream film, and given the ways in which their labor in the home is simultaneously desired and exploited, the popularity of Perry’s films does not suggest that his representations of healing foster black women’s self-empowerment. Rather, his popularity points to a moment where black women’s pain is a commodity and their instructive journeys to wellness are an exploited site where writers can carry out their own agendas.

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, Jan 16, 2013

Although contemporary African American women’s self-help books contain numerous persuasive appeal... more Although contemporary African American women’s self-help books contain numerous persuasive appeals and strategies and often endorse such composing practices as journaling as steps readers can undertake to reach states of transformation and enlightenment, little specific attention has been paid to them or the significance of their popularity within rhetoric and composition. This essay analyzes the rhetorics of healing, or persuasive messages, strategies, and curricula writers deploy to teach readers how to overcome crises, in a corpus of motivational speaker and author Iyanla Vanzant’s earliest self-help books to model the type of framework needed to understand what these books contribute to rhetorical scholarship. Reeducation as rhetorical healing in Vanzant’s self-help books reveals an increasingly complex terrain of rhetorical activity where these texts function as sources of intervention and sites of instruction.

Rhetoric Review , Apr 2012

The canonization of vocal African-American women scholars and activists is a trend that can obscu... more 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.

Book Reviews by Tamika L. Carey

Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 2023

This forum is occasioned by the publication of Vincent W. Lloyd's Black Dignity, a provocative wo... more This forum is occasioned by the publication of Vincent W. Lloyd's Black Dignity, a provocative work of philosophy from a scholar whose intellectual efforts emerge from the intersections of race, religion, and politics. Lloyd develops the concept of Black dignity by placing the active struggle against domination at the center of his inquiry, specifically the struggle against anti-Blackness as a defining feature of life in the United States. This philosophical treatise will be of interest to scholars of rhetoric for the variety of reasons outlined in the reviews that follow. There is a dynamic of mutual exchange at work in these pages: scholars of rhetoric elucidate what our field can learn from a philosophical approach to the study of Black dignity and struggle, and they also show how these philosophical insights can be usefully extended. Karma R. Chávez attends to the material and sonic situation of her reading experience, addresses how Lloyd frames the question of domination and struggle, and invokes the work of the rhetoric scholar Josue David Cisneros. Coretta M. Pittman begins with a meditative approach that lingers on Lloyd's conception of the ontic and the ontological. She then considers the ongoing work of struggle as the site of dignity, positing the convergence of Lloyd's philosophical investigations and of rhetorical studies in the work of renewal-in finding fresh starts and inventing new paths. Tamika L. Carey closes this forum with advice about how to use fighting words, that is, how to use language in the cause of Black dignity: with precision, intentionality, wisdom, perspective, and a collaborative respect for different techniques of struggle. Positioning her line of thinking within a scholarly constellation shaped by Black feminist, womanist, and Black queer activist thought, she focuses on Lloyd's conception of Black rage and its connections with rhetorical impatience.

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, Dec 1, 2015

Books by Tamika L. Carey

Since the Black women’s literary renaissance ended nearly three decades ago, a profitable and exp... more Since the Black women’s literary renaissance ended nearly three decades ago, a profitable and expansive market of self-help books, inspirational literature, family-friendly plays, and films marketed to Black women has emerged. Through messages of hope and responsibility, the writers of these texts develop templates that tap into legacies of literacy as activism, preaching techniques, and narrative formulas to teach strategies for overcoming personal traumas or dilemmas and resuming one’s quality of life.

Drawing upon Black vernacular culture as well as scholarship in rhetorical theory, literacy studies, Black feminism, literary theory, and cultural studies, Tamika L. Carey deftly traces discourses on healing within the writings and teachings of such figures as Oprah Winfrey, Iyanla Vanzant, T. D. Jakes, and Tyler Perry, revealing the arguments and curricula they rely on to engage Black women and guide them to an idealized conception of wellness. As Carey demonstrates, Black women’s wellness campaigns indicate how African Americans use rhetorical education to solve social problems within their communities and the complex gender politics that are mass-produced when these efforts are commercialized.