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

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Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview With Gayl Jones,” Callaloo 16 (1982), 40.

  2. 2.

    “Sanctuary,” New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1999, 14.

  3. 3.

    “Speaking in Typeface: Characterizing Stereotypes in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito ,” MFS 49 (2003), 129. Here, also see Deborah McDowell’s review, “The Whole Story,” Women’s Review of Books 16.6 (1999): 9–10.

  4. 4.

    In the introduction to their edited collection Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 3–69.

  5. 5.

    “Is an open wound.”

  6. 6.

    Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 25.

  7. 7.

    Here, see Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

  8. 8.

    For example, Casey Clabough, “Afrocentric Recolonizations: Gayl Jones 1990s Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 2 (2005): 243–274; Sarika Chandra, “Interruptions: Traditions, Borders, and Narrative in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito ,” in After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones, ed. Fiona Mills and Keith Mitchell (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 137–153; Fiona Mills, “Telling the Untold Tale: Afro-Latino/a Identifications in the Work of Gayl Jones,” in Mills and Mitchell, 91–115; Lovalerie King, “Resistance, Reappropriation and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’ Song for Anninho,” Callaloo 27 (2004): 755–767; Stellamaris Coser, “Stepping-stones Between the Americas: The Narratives of Paule Marshall and Gayl Jones,” PALARA 1 (1997): 80–88; Ifeoma Nwankwo, “The Promises and Perils of US African-American Hemispherism: Latin America in Martin Delany’s Blake and Gayl Jones’ Mosquito,” ALH 18.3 (2006): 579–599; and Angela Naimou, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 145–147, 154–182.

  9. 9.

    For an account of some of this internationally minded scholarship, see two essays by Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a local phase of a world problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” JAH 86 (1999): 1045–1077; and “How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 123–147. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) describes the dislocations and challenges of a transatlantic African diaspora between the world wars. Perhaps most influentially, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) traced the role played by the transatlantic migrations of African-descended people in the making of the modern west.

  10. 10.

    See, for example, Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); and José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

  11. 11.

    A partial wall was built along the Rio Grande in 2006 as part of the Secure Fence Act, although it is not uninterrupted. http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/23/politics/border-series-texas/index.html. See Alan Gomez and David Agren, “First protected DREAMer is deported under Trump,” USA Today 18 April 2017; Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump Orders Mexican Wall to Be Built and Plans to Block Syrian Refugees,” New York Times 25 January 2017; and Kevin Sieff, “U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question,” Washington Post.com 1 September 2018.

  12. 12.

    In the version of the speech he actually delivered, Sessions omitted the phrase “against this filth,” although it had already been circulated in the prepared version he provided to the press.

  13. 13.

    Dana Milbank, “Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona,” Washington Post.com, 11 July 2010, includes the information from coroners’ offices and police agencies.

  14. 14.

    Recent studies indicating that undocumented immigrants are in fact more law-abiding than either native-born citizens or legal immigrants include Bianca Bersani, “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” Justice Quarterly 31.2 (2014): 315–343; and Michael T. Light and Ty Miller, “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?,” Criminology 56.2 (2018): 370–401.

  15. 15.

    Jenny Jarvie, “Trump promised a border wall. Now these Texans worry the government will take their land,” Los Angeles Times 20 April 2017.

  16. 16.

    On ways in which black studies anticipated many of the characteristic methods of cultural studies, see Mae Henderson, “‘Where, by the Way, is This Train Going?’: A Case for Black (Cultural) Studies,” Callaloo 19 (1996): 60–67. On tensions in the academy between the rise of postcolonial theory at the cost of the possible displacement of ethnic studies, see Ann DuCille, “Postcolonialism and Afrocentricity: Discourse and Dat Course,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African-American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 28–41. On the limits of postcoloniality as an analytical tool for US cultures, see Lora Romero, “Nationalism and Internationalism: Domestic Differences in a Postcolonial World,” American Literature 67 (1995): 795–800.

  17. 17.

    Here, see especially Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

  18. 18.

    Ella Shohat, “Notes on the Post-Colonial,” Social Text 31 (1992): 99–113.

  19. 19.

    On the first of these topics, see Ian Smith, “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” SQ 67, no. 1 (2016): 104–124. Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), is one recent discussion of the rich history of contemporary nonwhite American Shakespeare adaptations.

  20. 20.

    Besides Smith, note 19 above, see Lara Bovilsky’s Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 14–33.

  21. 21.

    See Tom Cain, “John Donne and the Ideology of Colonialism,” ELR 31 (2001): 440–476; Shankar Raman, “Can’t Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne’s Erotic Verse,” Criticism 43 (2002): 135–168; and Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark, DE: Associated University Presses, 1998), 64–103.

  22. 22.

    The literature on the connection between maps and Renaissance colonialism is large and rich. See, for example, Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 259–314; Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580–1640 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 67–112; David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 5–24; Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001); and Jerry Brotton, “Mapping the Early Modern Nation: Cartography Along the English Margins,” Paragraph 19 (1996): 139–155.

  23. 23.

    Lisa Gorton, “Donne’s Use of Space,” EMLS 4.2 (1990): 9.1–27.

  24. 24.

    Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12. His discussions, 25–30 and 137–140, of the significance of Othello’s geographic origins and experiences in lands outside Venice are relevant here. Also see Martin Orkin, “Civility and the English Colonial Enterprise: Notes on Shakespeare’s Othello,” Theoria 68 (1986): 1–14.

  25. 25.

    Vico quotes his own Axioms on p. 254 of The New Science, ed. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948). Gillies discusses the significance of Viconian ideas of the familiar and the foreign, 4–12.

  26. 26.

    On the fantastical elements of Othello’s history and how they work to associate him and his marriage with notions of the monstrous and uncivilized, see Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light,” in Hendricks and Parker, Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing (London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100.

  27. 27.

    Kim Hall, Othello (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 248. I have drawn heavily on Hall’s discussion of Cyprus in the Renaissance, 248–249. Also see Virginia M. Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 22–28.

  28. 28.

    On Othello ’s eastern contexts, see Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 77–106; and Ambereen Dadabhoy, “Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage,” in Othello: The State of Play, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 121–147.

  29. 29.

    For discussions of some of these works, see Jyotsna Singh, “Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 191–220; Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 557–578; Chantal Zabus, Tempests After Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Peter Hulme, “Reading From Elsewhere: George Lamming and the Paradox of Exile,” in ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 220–235; and Jonathan Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

  30. 30.

    A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: Adaptation for a Black Theatre, tr. Richard Miller (New York: TCG Translations, 2002), 20.

  31. 31.

    In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 177–206, Paul Gilroy mounted a controversial critique of contemporary black nationalism, which focuses on what he sees as its retreat from programmatic political engagement into a romantic view of a sovereign individuality which it virtually always denominates as male. On women and gender within the Négritude movement, whose historiography has been strikingly male-oriented, see Edwards, 119–185.

  32. 32.

    Mosquito holds this refusal in common with other revisions of Shakespeare by black American women. See two essays in Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Malin Lavon Walther, “Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby: Re-Figuring the Colonizer’s Aesthetics,” 137–149, and Valerie Traub, “Rainbows of Darkness: Deconstructing Shakespeare in the Work of Gloria Naylor and Zora Neale Hurston,” 150–164; as well as James Andreas, “Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day,” in Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, ed., Shakespeare and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 1999), 103–118; and Gilbert Yeoh, “From Caliban to Sycorax: Revisions of The Tempest in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,” World Literature Written in English 33–34, no. 1–2 (1994): 103–116.

  33. 33.

    “New Ethnicities,” rpt. in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 166.

  34. 34.

    Here I am thinking about Stuart Hall’s remark in “Minimal Selves,” another essay reprinted in Black British Cultural Studies, that “Looking at new conceptions of identity requires us also to look at redefinitions of the forms of politics which follow from that: the politics of difference, the politics of self-reflexivity, a politics that is open to contingency but still able to act” (118).

  35. 35.

    I borrow my thoughts on the Perfectability Baptists’ internally multiple identities and Mosquito’s identification with a sense of her own blackness that is more than either merely African or merely American from Kelley, “How the West Was One”: “Too frequently, we think of identities as cultural matters, when in fact some of the most dynamic (transnational) identities are created in the realm of politics, in the way people of African descent sought alliances and political identifications across national borders” (136).

  36. 36.

    This is a point Denise Albanese makes in “Black and White and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theatre’s ‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 226–247. Also see Angela Pao, “Ocular Revisions; Re-Casting Othello in Text and Performance,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 27–45.

  37. 37.

    Edward Said quotes James on p. 300 of Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).

  38. 38.

    On Baartman, see Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 223–261, and Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018).

  39. 39.

    Here, see Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000).

  40. 40.

    Archer-Straw discusses the Baker phenomenon, 107–133. Also see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 105–118, and Royster, Becoming Cleopatra, 9–11 and 15–17.

  41. 41.

    Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 46.

  42. 42.

    See, for example, Paul H. D. Kaplan, “The Earliest Images of Othello ,” SQ 39 (1988): 171–186; Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” SQ 40 (1989): 383–412; Kris Collins, “White-Washing the Black-a-Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy, and Parodies of Blackness,” JAC 19.1 (1996): 87–101; and Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 133–146.

  43. 43.

    Fusco, 69.

  44. 44.

    Bovilsky, Barbarous Play, 37–65.

  45. 45.

    On Jones’ use of the archive, see Naimou, Salvage Work, 173–179.

  46. 46.

    At the risk of sounding pedantic, “Jim Dandy to the Rescue” was a late-1970s hit by the southern rock band Black Oak Arkansas.

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  1. University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Joyce Green MacDonald

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Green MacDonald, J. (2020). Claiming Wisdom: Re-reading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito. In: Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_2

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