Reading the Other Washington Novel
Session Coordinator: Jeffrey Charis-Carlson
Dept. of English, University of Iowa
308 EPB, Iowa City, Iowa, 52242
jeffrey-charis-carlson@uiowa.edu

Dicty?: The Black Middle Class in Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was in Vogue

When Washington Was in Vogue is a previously lost novel from the Harlem Renaissance. The book was published anonymously and serially in 1925-1926 in The Messenger under the title The Letters of Davy Carr; I discovered the book in 1996, and HarperCollins published it in 2004. The novel tells the story of Captain Davy Carr, a WWI veteran who comes to the District to research the transatlantic slave trade. A self-described mid-Victorian who is fair enough to pass for white, Davy moves into a boardinghouse owned by Mrs. Margaret Rhodes; over the course of the novel, he falls in love with his landlady’s daughter, the thoroughly modern Caroline. Thus, unlike a typical “Washington novel,” the intrigue has little do with national politics, and instead revolves around the question, “is the love of an up-to-date, modern girl worth having?” This paper will compare Williams’s glittering, vibrant black Washington with contemporary descriptions from writers such as Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, who portray the city’s black enclave as hopelessly bourgeois and stuffy. I will argue that—in light of the world Williams presents—we should re-examine given ideas about the African American middle class in 1920s Washington.

Adam McKible
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
adam.mckible@verizon.net

Getting Lost in the Washingtons of Edward P. Jones and George Pelecanos

With a skyline featuring some of the world’s most recognizable buildings and a street layout as easy to follow as A-B-C-1-2-3, the “ Washington” of most “ Washington novels” often is dismissed as a cardboard setting for plot-driven narratives. In 1992, the debut works of Edward P. Jones (Lost in the City) and George Pelecanos (A Firing Offense) defamiliarized such depictions of D.C. by attempting to privilege Washington, the city, over Washington, the capital. While writing in different genres -- Jones in epiphany-rich short stories and Pelecanos in hard-boiled crime fiction -- both writers disorient their readers and their characters with an abundance of specific regional references. Jones and Pelecanos, in fact, identify real “ Washington” in the sections of the city that, to the rest of the nation and the media-watching world, often are depicted as the most unreal. This paper will focus on how the geographic references help to legitimate the literary representation of these neighborhoods and to chart the literal distances between such neighborhoods and the Capitol. Rather than avoid representing Washington’s governmental-monumental core, Jones and Pelecanos document the indirect ways that the “shiny, federal Disneyland on the Potomac” affects the everyday lives of the citizens who live closest to it.

Jeffrey Charis-Carlson
The University of Iowa
jeffrey-charis-carlson@uiowa.edu

Stephen Carter as ‘Othered’ Washington Novelist?

The excitement surrounding the publication event of Stephen Carter’s novel The Emperor of Ocean Park in 2002 pointed to the public acceptance of an African American novel into the mainstream of popular culture. How can we “locate” this novel, and Ocean Park, or Oak Bluffs, in turn? Oak Bluffs, a wealthy black suburb of Washington, D.C., reflects the work’s centered, yet marginalized, position within the culture. The characters view their town as a haven from the intrigues and complications of the nation’s capital, even though their work and political life often draws them into the center of the city, and of the nation as a whole. Similar to the duality of roles that the D.C. area plays in the national imaginary, as both a center of political life and a region with its distinct personality and style, this novel straddles the line between the global and the local. Why was this novel in particular marketed as a mainstream, as opposed to ethnic, novel? Can we consider Carter an “American” novelist, or does he represent the otherness and difference that is surfacing in the regional literature of the District?

Lori Ween
Bard High School Early College
lween@bhsec.bard.edu