Seacole, Mary | Sandra Gunning (essay date summer 2001)
Sandra Gunning (essay date summer 2001)
SOURCE: Gunning, Sandra. “Traveling with Her Mother's Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Signs 26, no. 4 (summer 2001): 949-81.
[In the following essay, Gunning discusses Seacole's ability to successfully integrate herself into a wide variety of communities, as reflected in her autobiography. The critic also evaluates the different ways in which Wonderful Adventures has been appropriated by British and American scholars.]
The autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands ([1857] 1984) by Jamaican mixed-race “Creole” Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-81) reveals a great deal about the complex interplay in the nineteenth century between gendered mobility, black diaspora identity, colonial power, and transnational circularity.1 As a black entrepreneur and “doctress” who...
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