I. identity?

Georgia Douglas Johnson (GDJ) is

black. modernist. harlem renaissance. new negro. middleclass. poet. playwright. woman. editor. edited. in Crisis. in crisis.

II. intersection(ality)

GDJ:

BLACK MODERNIST?

          MODERNIST POET?

                      POET WOMEN?

                                    WOMAN EDITED?

                                    EDITED NEW NEGRO?

                                    NEW NEGRO ARTIST?

                              ARTIST MOTHER?

(or maybe? all… of the above?)

we cannot simplify the intersection of the crisis in our categorization

in how

III. we read the bibliographic codes

⇓down

 

right⇒                                                 ⇐ left

                           up⇑

and in the center of the page.

bibliographic codes (the organization of the information on the page)

makes a multitude of implicit value judgements.

Like: we want to make a point with this decentered paragraph more than we want to respect your preference for centrality.

or even that –

letters are better than   b  l  a  n  k   spaces (sometimes).

and the child on our front page preaches a propaganda

like when a picture of a child appeared next to GDJ’s poem on motherhood

and suddenly the words didn’t speak by themselves.

IV. dedication

SO WE DEDICATE THIS PROJECT TO A COMPLEX GAZE ON (SOME)EVERYTHING GDJ

and we offer these humble binaries (the code, that is) to

Georgia Douglas Johnson.

whose art and life REQUIRE complication, multiplicity, and demand (for a start)

– reread renaissances

– palimpsests of perspectives

– demystified modernisms

– black feminist bildungsromans

– recontextualized canons

– decontextualized corpuses

&

attention. she requires your attention.

as we treat

V. a digital remediation as an argument for computational intersectionality

because now, right now, let us introduce you to the meeting of your gaze and a billion pixels. And the hope that the life that they create in your meaning making

is more what it is than anyone’s imposition.