Lost in the City: Mapping Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction

Despite the long history and dense population of African Americans living in or near the nation’s capital, the predominantly Black quadrants of Washington, DC have a relatively small presence in the scholarship on African American literature. In Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), however, Pulitzer Prize Winner Edward P. Jones provides thorough and expansive depictions of neighborhoods and cultural landmarks in DC. Focusing on what were then predominantly Black neighborhoods in Washington, DC, these two collections offer unique and enriching opportunities for analyzing, or more accurately, geocoding an African American author’s repeated treatments of the nation’s capital.

This presentation explains how I use digital tools to visualize an extensive metadata catalogue that tracks Jones’s location specific references in his short fiction. Jones enact cultural map-making by mentioning physical environments, streets, and locales. The identification and categorization of those places correspond to our contemporary age of GPS. Taking account of the many instances of writers marking and referencing locations throughout their works illuminates the centrality of geography in African American artistic compositions. Jones’s use of location-specific words contributes to how readers envision the city and his characters’ various environments by using recognizably black neighborhoods to assist in constructing his stories’ plot as well as characterization. Ultimately, this presentation analyzes Jones’s inclination to map the city by identifying streets and landmarks in such detail allow him to achieve new ground among prominent Black writers known for presenting a sense of place in their works.