Claiming Wisdom: Re-reading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito

Focusing on the last novel by American author Gayl Jones, this chapter connects Mosquito’s interest in dissolving borders between states and between registers of knowledge to Jones’ longstanding interest in describing histories of African-descended people throughout the Americas. The people Jones’ heroine meets and the stories she hears along the border map over the plot of Othello; both works share an interest in voyaging and crossing borders. Jones’ novel further replays Othello by moving its action to the American southwest, by creating a whole secret community—the Daughters of Nzingha—of black women in response to the African women who were so important in forming Othello but who are absent from the play, and by transmuting the terror and danger that the play’s account of an interracial love affair has accumulated in its performance history.