Books
Jessica Marie Johnson is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020).
Johnson is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mmimo of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities (under peer review). She is also guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (formerly sx:archipelagos) (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017).
- winner of the 2020 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize for Louisiana History
- winner of the 2020 Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Readers' Award
- finalist for the 2021 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for the Study of American History
- honorable mention for the 2021 Barbara Christian Literary Prize from the Caribbean Studies Association
- honorable mention for the 2021 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial History Society/Société d'histoire coloniale française
- honorable mention for the 2021 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians
- honorable mention for the 2021 Pauli Murray Book Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society
- named a "Best Black History Book" of 2020 by *Black Perspectives*, the publication of the African American Intellectual History Society
Cover Art by Delita Martin
She is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mmino of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities (under peer review).
Editors: Jessica Marie Johnson, Kaiama Glover and Alex Gil
Slavery in the Machine: A Special Issue of archipelagos journal [Click Here]
“This special issue of archipelagos journal “Slavery in the Machine,” sings out with that same defiance. In the face of environmental catastrophes, “unpayable debt” levied by a global north created out of plantation profits, police and military violence, and the continued predations of US empire, the Caribbean and its diaspora refuse death. Our women, children, and men rebuke the “bad press” spoken in their name by outsiders. Our artists refuse to be bound by the permutations of forced migration or nation-centric narratives of being, cleaving instead to affinities, networks, relations that cross islands and mainlands, race and empire. If this story of refusal seems timeless as well as deathless, or if in evoking a dense humanity and attention to spirit, the past, present, and future appear to cycle back through wind currents ridden by conquistadores in 1492 or the combustion of revolt that marked 1791, this, too, is part of the work. Which is to say, refusing linear historical accounts for multilayered and collagic narratives is accountable Caribbeanist scholarly praxis. Refusing material or empirical knowledges for the fractional and fractal, the hidden books, the hauntings at the crossroads, is diasporic and ancestral intellectual labor. If being deathless requires an art, a discipline, an ethic, a way of being, then the Caribbean has death mastered.”
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “We Are Deathless (Slavery in the Machine)” archipelagos journal (2019)
Editors: Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal In Print, 2017. [Click Here]
“Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical. As praxis and methodology, it waxes insurgent. It refutes conceptions of the digital that remove black diasporic people from engagement with technology, modernity, or the future. It centers black thought and cultural production across a range of digital platforms, but especially social media, where black freedom struggles intersect with black play and death in polymorphic and polyphonic intimacy.”
Cover Art by John Jennings
- Johnson and Neal, “Introduction, “Wild Seed in the Machine,” Black Code (2017) [Read the full introduction here]
