Digital Object Identifier
One of the eminent female poets of the Harlem Renaissance to attain recognition after Frances Harper was Georgia Douglas Johnson, who is highly appreciated in recent years for addressing problematic issues, such as identity, memory, and Migration, under the subterfuge of her feminine, genteel writing, defined as “compensatory conservatism” (Tate xxxiii). In the eponymous poem, “Hegira, she delineated the Great Migration, the demographic shift of the African American population from the rural South to the urban North and painful memories associated with it. Her poems in the collection of poetry, Bronze, apart from being replete with references to racial injustice, also comment on the painful circumstances under which the black population was compelled to undertake the northward journey. Likewise, “Sonnet to the Mantled”, “Sonnet to Those Who But See Darkly”, and “The Passing of the Ex-Slave” are poems that poignantly encapsulate the memory of injustice that propelled the African American community to migrate to safer places. For them, the Great Migration was not only an external process of relocation and resettlement but also perpetually scarred their minds and identities, which often resurfaced in glimpses of memory. This research article aims to demonstrate how the Great Migration impacted the poet’s identity and literary works by critically analysing several relevant poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson in this context. The article will focus on the poet’s biracial identity and how she redefined it, forged under the influence of ancestral memory and trauma, which played a crucial role in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetry.
Suchismita Sarkar. “Identity, Migration, and Trauma in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Poetry.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 71-88. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.5.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
the-criterion.com