Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones's Short Fiction

Geo-Tagging Edward P. Jones's Short Fiction

While African American migration remains a significant subject in literary and historical scholarship, geography itself has not been a major feature of literary analysis—especially in black short fiction. Yet geographical references have been integral to the production of narratives by black writers. Black writers enact cultural map-making by mentioning physical environments, streets, and locales. The identification and categorization of those places correspond to our contemporary age of GIS. 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.

Edward P. Jones’s short stories, focusing on predominately black neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., offer unique and enriching opportunities for analyzing, or more accurately, “geocoding” an African American author’s repeated treatments of a geographic region. Jones’s two collections of short stories provide thorough and expansive depictions of the intersections between people, neighborhoods, and cultural landmarks in DC. What we might refer to as Jones’s “cultural geotagging” in his short stories, whereby he highlights racial-spatial dimensions of the city in his stories, provides multiple renderings of Washington and thereby offering diverse representations of black men and their experiences in a select geographic region.

As a method, cultural geo-tagging, enhances our examinations of literature. Cultural geo-tagging refers to documenting and analyzing geographic characteristics related to short fiction. This process accounts for words used to describe physical environments. By documenting the amount and variety of geographical references, including regional settings, landmarks, street names, neighborhoods, and regional dialects, we begin to understand how black writers mark and plot cultural spaces.

Digital tools facilitate the production of visual projections. Creating data visualizations of this type of information gives us a useful view of writers presenting characters in distinct contexts. This project analyzes why Jones’s meticulous city narratives are collectively groundbreaking in the geographic histories of African American short stories.



Writers process of identifying locations likens their methods to the practice of utilizing electronic devices and social media to identify the precise locations of a person or group of people in a given geographic space.  People who use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram often use geotagging technology to make “friends,” “followers,” and general audiences aware of where they are or where places are located on a geographical grid as a means of establishing credibility by being associated with specific locations.

Readers interested in cultural geo-tagging might raise the following questions:With this approach, my students and I study Edward P. Jones’s short fiction alongside other canonical texts and pinpoint the extent to which Jones is attuned to the landscape of Washington, DC. Despite the long history and dense population of African Americans living in or near the nation’s capital, the predominately black quadrants of Washington D.C., have a relatively small presence in the scholarship on African American literature. Edward P. Jones’s two collections of short stories provide thorough and expansive depictions of neighbor and cultural landmarks in DC.
 

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