Traditional Rebirth: The Epistolary Genre in When Washington Was in Vogue

While When Washington Was in Vogue is set during the Harlem Renaissance, its genre and narrator belong to older times across the pond. Instead of recognizing the New Negro’s African ancestry, Edward Christopher Williams Charles Chesnutt’s son, portrays his British ideological history by narrating the Harlem Renaissance in a mode of epistolarity derived from Anglo-Saxon, European literary traditions. In Williams’s fictional account, the African American’s physical transplantation from Africa affected an ancestral and ideological transplantation that identifies more with America’s ancestral history—England. It offers a new way to understand the influence of America’s European ancestry on the black American.