[In the following essay, Baggett discusses the contradiction between Seacole's desire to be a part of British culture and her natural tendency toward her native Jamaican heritage.]

Recent attention paid to Caribbean literary works has highlighted the complex relationship between home and identity for the Caribbean subject. Researchers in (post)colonial and cultural studies find many of these texts especially appealing because they refuse any simple equation between cultural identification and national homeland. Antonio Benitez-Rojo's postmodern critique The Repeating Island examines the Caribbean subject's multiple racial, ethnic and national affiliations, demonstrating how productive a field Caribbean literature is for exploring the current themes of cultural heterogeneity, subjective fragmentation, and transnational identity.¹ One finds in many Caribbean works a negotiation of intercultural identities, as the narratives relate experiences of displacement from rural to urban spaces, from one island to another, or from island to the “main lands” of United States, Europe, or Africa. In addition to illustrating spatial displacements, such narratives demonstrate historical discontinuities as well, tracing multiple lineages that cross racial, cultural and class boundaries.²

This paper examines the relationship between home and cultural identity for Mary Seacole, the nineteenth-century, free-born, Jamaican Creole, who recounts her life as a hotel keeper and “doctress” in her autobiographical travel narrative Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. I have pointed out some of the common themes within recent Caribbean works to explore how Seacole, one of the first black female voices to be published in England, prefigures these later Caribbean writers as she struggles to locate a space of authority in the face of racism, sexism, and cultural prejudice. There are, indeed, clear differences between Seacole's story and later Caribbean voices. Unlike Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff or Edwidge Danticat, all women writers who foreground both cultural hybridity and the abuses of the colonial presence in the West Indies, Seacole's narrative delineates a clear sense of cultural and national alliance with the colonial power, even demonstrating an enthusiastic loyalty toward England and its imperialist enterprises beyond its borders. Though Jamaican-born, and “yellow” in the eyes of the English, Seacole rarely discusses her Jamaican heritage and refuses to address the abuses Jamaica suffered under British rule. Her narrative is very much in the same vein as the Victorian travel narratives that report heroic adventures of the most-often male traveler. Seacole too relates her adventures as she lives and works in such liminal spaces as New Granada and the Crimea, outside the borders of the British Empire, and even celebrates the British war efforts in the Crimea with patriotic fervor.³ Despite her expressions of anger and contempt for racial prejudice (particularly against white North Americans), and an open sympathy and admiration for the struggling black populations of New Granada, she nonetheless strives to live according to the English values of the white “industrious” bourgeoisie, a value attributed to her “good Scotch blood” (1). Her mission as a hospital nurse and her running of the British Hotel, where she provides all the English comforts for soldiers away from home, indicate both a faithfulness to the colonialist spirit and a thorough consumption of the Victorian “Englishness” she claims as part of her own cultural inheritance.

My analysis, however, challenges any absolute positioning of Seacole as subordinate to the colonial power. Despite her seeming conformity to Victorian bourgeois ideology, she still demonstrates an autonomous agency as she forges a discursive space for herself. Sandra Pouchet Paquet points out how Seacole's experience is clearly not that of Mary Prince's suffering as a slave under British rule described in the 1831 autobiography The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Because of Seacole's more privileged status, freedom for her does not require a resistance to the imperialistic policies of the Empire. Unlike many of the former slaves who continued as field workers and servants, Seacole enjoyed a relatively privileged position as a Creole. As a free-born Jamaican, raised by her mother who also kept a boarding-house and was also “an admirable doctress; in high repute with the officers …,” Seacole hardly had reason to challenge the authority of British rule (2). Historians, in fact, point out a loyalty toward England even before Emancipation, as the Jamaican slaves understood that England had already set them free in 1772, and believed that since that time the planter class was keeping them illegally enslaved. Many argue that this misunderstanding of legislature allowed England to maintain their authority.⁴

Paquet highlights moments in Seacole's narrative where she challenges the boundaries of race, gender, and privilege. I would add, however, that these instances of prejudice are more often repressed than not. She refuses, for instance, to elaborate much about her first visit to London, when her skin color made her the target of some young boys' jokes. Seacole writes:

I shall never forget my first impression of London. Of course, I am not going to bore the reader with them … ; Strangely enough, some of the most vivid of my recollections are the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my and my companion's complexion. I am only a little brown—a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my companion was very dark, and a fair … subject for their rude wit. She was hot-tempered, poor thing! and as there were no policemen to awe the boys and turn our servants' heads in those days, our progress through the London streets was sometimes a rather chequered one.

(4)

Here, the narrative reveals a cautious articulation of her color and of the racial prejudices she experienced during her first visit to the colonial metropole. Claiming she will not “bore the reader” with these details, and indicating it strange that her “most vivid recollections” should involve this confrontation, suggest her fear of insulting her readers. Her text reveals a desire to conform to the reading tastes of her (white) English audience, and this desire goes beyond merely wanting to avoid “uncomfortable” subjects like racial discrimination. Her self-description as one who comes close to resembling “the brunettes whom you all admire so much” suggests an economy of desire between herself and a chiefly white male imagination from whom she seeks recognition. Rather than elaborate any on the “rude wit” of the boys, she uses this instance to introduce the reader to her own complexion, as if to reassure them that she is, as Homi Bhabha describes the colonized subject in another context, almost, but not quite, “like them.”⁵

It is therefore not always easy to decipher where resistance and conformity begin and end. The discourse of Seacole is so entwined within a colonialist vision and her own will so often concerned with the collective will of the Empire that the dimensions of her freedom and the degree of her autonomy are rather dubious.⁶ Seacole occupies a peculiar space in the history of the Jamaican subject, whose cultural identity during the years immediately following the 1833 abolition of slaves in the colonies often required a negotiation between the consciousness of the colonizer and the colonized. Her status as a female mulatto and a professional, combined with her emulation of British values, reveals the complex alliances for some nineteenth century subjects living on the borders of the Empire and challenges the spatial, cultural, racial and sexual boundaries which would exclude them. In claiming to be both Jamaican and British, Seacole ultimately displaces conventional significations of both home and cultural identity.

Seacole makes clear from the beginning that her autobiographical narrative does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of her whole life. The substance of her omission, however, should not be overlooked, as it signifies the stakes involved in her discourse. Amy Robinson convincingly argues that, in order to be heard, Seacole centers her discourse within conventions familiar to her English audience: In order to construct herself according to the conventions of the travel narrative, whose hero normally ventures beyond the safe and secure atmosphere of home to the distant lands of the “dark unknown,” Seacole must first displace her origins from the “dark unknown” Jamaica and realign herself as closely as possible to a thoroughly English-bred traveler. After divulging her birthplace (but not her age) in “the town of Kingston, in the island of Jamaica, some time in the present century,” Seacole attempts to salvage the trust of her readers by immediately launching into a description of her Scottish lineage:

I am a Creole, and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins. My father was a soldier, of an old Scotch family; and to him I often trace my affection for a camp-life, and my sympathy with what I have heard my friends call “the pomp, pride, and circumstance of glorious war.” Many people have also traced to my Scotch blood that energy and activity which are not always found in the Creole race, and which have carried me to so many varied scenes: and perhaps they are right. I have often heard the term “lazy Creole” applied to my country people; but I am sure I do not know what it is to be indolent. … That these qualities have led me into many countries, and brought me into some strange and amusing adventures, the reader, if he or she has the patience to get through this book, will see.

(1-2)

Since the writing of this book was chiefly a monied venture, an attempt to recover from her bankruptcy after the war, Seacole is understandably quick to gain credibility and to establish familiarity with her readers by dispensing with any potential prejudices against her. Rather than attack the validity of the “lazy Creole” stereotype, she casts herself as an exception to the rule. Her emphasis on her militant nationalism and industrious energy position her as a loyal English subject, suggesting a self-less, patriotic motivation behind the travels she will relate. Not only does she have “good Scotch blood” but also comes from the “coursing” blood of a soldier, the ultimate proof of her citizenry.

When it comes to the “other side” of her ancestry, Seacole strategically evades any elaboration, claiming “It is not my intention to dwell at any length upon the recollections of my childhood” (2). And when any occasion arises in her experiences to complain against the abuses she or any other Jamaicans might have suffered at the hands of the British, she maintains an optimistic, forgiving, and forgetful demeanor, stating, “Indeed, my experience of the world … leads me to the conclusion that it is by no means the hard bad world which some selfish people would have us believe it” (7). Seacole transforms any feelings of resentment toward the colonizer as selfishness. Indeed, any expressed resentment coming from a Jamaican mulatto at the time could easily have posed a threat to the respect and authority England continued to enjoy over its territories. Seacole could have complained for many reasons: While the mulattos, legally termed “mixed race” populations, were better off than the designated “coloured” class, they still were not allowed to vote, hold public office, practice in most professions, or gain any sizable fortunes for themselves. For Seacole to address these continued injustices, however, would have reduced, if not eliminated, her chances of gaining the admiration (and financial support) she so desired. Ziggy Alexander and Audrey Dewjee explain:

the mulatto community was regarded as a threat by the white population. As the numbers of mulattos increased, so did the fear of possible alliance between the African slaves and these free “people of colour.” Whites were all too conscious of the part played by mulattos in the struggles for Haitian independence, which was finally achieved in 1803. The Jamaican authorities therefore did everything in their power to prevent the political, economic and social advancement of the free descendants of slaves.

(11)

Considered within the historical context of its publication, Seacole's narrative walks a fine line between expressing her loyalty as a British subject and revealing her own autonomy as an educated, economically independent woman. Her migratory existence could easily be read as a threat to the stability of the Empire, whose economic interests would have best been served by maintaining a relative containment of its cheap labor forces abroad. But Seacole strategically directs the reader's attention away from her Jamaican origins, her marriage, and her subsequent widowhood toward her adventures in other lands, displacing her Jamaican “otherness” in order to cast herself as a loyal British ambassador.

Seacole's colonialist spirit is as convincing an example of her status as a British subject as her claim to Scottish lineage. Far from expressing any contempt for modern technology which often laid waste lands in the interests of American or European economic gain, she celebrates the “civilizing” effects of technology's introduction into what she sees as “primitive” and “lawless” borderlands. She describes her arduous trip to New Granada with a true English appreciation for modern industry as it attempts to get the upper-hand over Mother Nature. Reflecting on the historical significance of the Panama Canal's construction, she writes:

It seemed as if nature had determined to throw every conceivable obstacle in the way of those who should seek to join the two great oceans of the world. I have read and heard many accounts of old endeauvors to effect this important and gigantic work, and how miserably they failed. It was reserved for the men of our age to accomplish what so many had died in attempting, and iron and steam, twin giants, subdued to man's will, have put a girdle over rocks and rivers, so that travellers can glide as smoothly, if not as inexpensively, over the once terrible Isthmus of Darien, as they can from London to Brighton.

(10)

Seacole's description offers profound insight into the neo-imperialistic practices of the United States during the mid-century.⁷ Indeed, one cannot help noticing the irony in introducing New Granada as her first “adventure” as the Panama Canal would become one of the most politicized success stories of American industrial expansion.⁸ Rather than travel to some “untouched” tropical territory, she travels from one space of capitalist exploitation to another. Seacole shares the enthusiasm of an American or European capitalist as she ponders the future conveniences and new wealth to be gained by having easier and faster access to the world via the opening up of such trade routes. Her reference to the “twin giants” of iron and steam, and the masculine rhetoric she employs to describe the goals of taming nature through industrial strength, epitomize the imperialist discourse of the time.

And she is more than an observer of capitalist, industrial expansion. Seacole wastes no time in making money off the many travelers and gold prospectors who pass through this transit location. She makes quick profit in her hotel trade in both Cruces and Gorgona, providing the travelers with everything from food and lodging to a clean shave. More significantly, it is here where Seacole puts her own ingenuity to practice and gains the reputation as “the yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera medicine” (27). She relates how upon her arrival she was put to work treating patients, since few of the doctors in the area had any knowledge of the disease. As a “doctress,” she combines the knowledge she gained from her mother's medical training with her own modern sensibility, going even so far as to perform a post-mortem examination on a young child. She explains:

Then it was that I began to think … if it were possible to take this little child and examine it, I should learn more of the terrible disease which was sparing neither young nor old, and should know better how to do battle with it. I was not afraid to use my baby patient thus. I knew its fled spirit would not reproach me, for I had done all I could for it in life, had shed tears over it, and prayed for it. …

It seems a strange deed to accomplish, and I am sure I could not wield the scalpel or the substitute I then used now, but at that time the excitement, had strung my mind up to a high pitch of courage and determination; and perhaps the daily, almost hourly, scenes of death had made me somewhat callous. I need not linger on this scene, nor give the readers the results of my operation; although novel to me, and decidedly useful, they were what every medical man well knows.

(30)

Here, Seacole's contemplation of the ethics of her actions recalls the questionable ethics of various other applications of nineteenth-century modern science and technology. Wavering between a concern for the spiritual welfare of the child and a desire for the practical knowledge to be gained through the examination, her narrative confronts English readers with some of their own modern dilemmas. Seacole's inability to articulate the stimuli that enabled her to perform the examination also makes such actions suspicious. Camouflaged beneath what she finally justifies as ultimately a humane, selfless action, which she insists produced “decidedly useful” results, is Seacole's own excitement which ultimately allowed her to carry out the act. Ironically, she confesses she could not repeat the act in her present circumstances in her modern, English surroundings. Like so many other imperialist enterprises, the dirty work is carried out on someone else's territory, while later the “medical men” in the imperial world's metropolitan centers reap the benefits.

While Seacole performs like a true British colonialist, she must also exert her authority as a female mulatto to legitimate the reputation she desires. In New Granada, she contends with the racist attitudes of the Americans, who cannot reconcile the color of her skin with her professional expertise. Though she shows herself capable of running a hotel and nursing back to health those who suffered under the cholera epidemic, her actions are considered by many to be the exception to the rules governing her race and gender. She recalls one of her many episodes of confrontation with the Americans sparked by a farewell dinner speech in her honor. Remembering the speech given during a Fourth of July party, Seacole humorously recounts the clumsy oration of one odd-looking American. She prefaces his speech by offering the following caricature:

The spokesman was a thin, sallow-looking American, with a pompous and yet rapid delivery, and a habit of turning over his words with his quid before delivering them, and clearing his mouth after each sentence, perhaps to make the blanks express the time expended on this operation. He dashed into his work at once, rolling up and getting rid of his sentences as he went on. …

(47)

While offering only praise and admiration for her fellow British subjects, she proves herself capable of ridicule in her description of the Americans. Characterizing him as arrogant and inarticulate, she recalls the following speech:

God bless the best yaller woman He ever made—, from Jamaica, gentlemen—, from the isle of Springs—Well, gentlemen, I expect there are only tu things we're vexed for—; and the first is, that she ain't one of us—, a citizen of the great United States—; and the other thing is, gentlemen—that Providence make her a yaller woman. I calculate, gentlemen, you're all as vexed as I am that she's not wholly white—, but I du reckon on your rejoicing with me that she's so many shades removed from being entirely black—; and I guess, if we could bleach her by any means we would—, and thus make her as acceptable in any company as she deserves to be—. Gentlemen, I give you Aunty Seacole!

(47)

This scene captures Seacole's aversion to Americans in general. Most often, she refers to them as crude, undereducated, and racist. She also indicates their constant threat to women, describing how women had to disguise themselves as men in order to protect themselves against harassment or rape. Following the man's expressed desire to bleach her skin, Seacole is quick to retaliate:

But I must say, that I don't altogether appreciate your friend's kind wishes with respect to my complexion. If it had been as dark as any nigger's, I should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much respected by those whose respect I value; and as to his offer of bleaching me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without any thanks. As to the society which the process might gain me admission into, all I can say is, that, judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don't think that I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general reformation of American manners.

(48)

Seacole demonstrates a consciousness which is not wholly inclined to accept a national alliance which casts her as inferior, revealing not only the limits of her diplomatic manner but also suggesting the limits of her national loyalty. While her reproach is directed toward Americans, it helps to define a larger capacity of her alliances, which, I would argue, incorporates a racial as well as national subjectivity. Whatever resistance her British readers might have in allowing her the authority to speak as a “yellow” British subject is indirectly condemned here. Her call for a “general reformation of American manners” presumes that her own British homeland is racially inclusive, or at least signals that it should be.

To argue that Seacole is without her own prejudices would ignore the many instances in which she makes clear racial, cultural, and class distinctions regarding the many “others” from whom she distances herself. Indeed, in the course of the narrative she contemptuously refers to the dirty Indians, “good-for-nothing black cooks,” “lazy Maltese,” “cunning-eyed Greeks,” and “indolent Turks.” Her prejudices become ever more apparent in her descriptions of her time in the Crimea. As Paquet has pointed out, New Granada provided her a place “to establish who she is on her own terms,” where she could learn to negotiate her English standards outside the borders of the Empire (652). Her time spent in the Crimea, which occupies the majority of her text, will require an even stronger alliance to Britain, since she enters a war zone where national alliances become more crucial to one's survival. Here, the differences between one national identity and another obviously involve much higher stakes. Securing herself a position among her British compatriots is as much a personal desire as it is a necessity for survival against the Russian forces.

As in New Granada, one of the ways she achieves recognition as a British subject is through her industry. By setting up the British Hotel, she becomes synonymous with all the other English commodities she offers. Taking on the new title, “Mother Seacole” she transforms herself into the substitute English mother to the soldiers. Reflecting on the care she provides the injured soldiers, she explains the importance of her representative status:

I tell you, reader, I have seen many a bold fellow's eyes moisten at such a season, when a woman's voice and a woman's care have brought to their minds recollections of those happy English homes which some of them never saw again; but many did, who will remember their woman-comrade upon the bleak and barren heights before Sebastopol.

Then their calling me “mother” was not, I think, altogether unmeaning. I used to fancy that there was something homely in the word; and, reader, you cannot think how dear to them was the smallest thing that reminded them of home.

(126-27)

Addressing the reader twice in this passage, Seacole offers as directly as possible a description of the British soldiers' recognition of her own British “homely” status. Indeed, as one of the few women in the warring region, “Mother Seacole” becomes the epitome of “Mother England” herself. And, the motherly familiarity she represents goes beyond her gender. She is the resource for all the commodities of home. Proud of the many comforts she provides at her hotel, she catalogues them with a “native's” appreciation, listing turtle, venison, linen and hosiery, saddlery, boots and shoes, meat and soups, salmon, lobster, oysters, fritters, and numerous other commodities. Seacole ultimately proves herself an enthusiastic entrepreneur, establishing businesses in the most unlikely places. Absent from their mothers and homes, the British soldiers find Seacole and her hotel a welcome substitute. And Seacole is sure to capitalize on both the demand for such commodities, as well as on the many expressions of appreciation she receives. In the narrative, she inserts copies of letters signed by her admirers, authenticating her reputation as a devoted hostess, nurse and patriot.

In the Crimea, Seacole positions herself within a British consciousness with all its own prejudices, being sure to distinguish herself not only from the Russian enemies, but from all other nationalities (French, Turkish, Maltese, and Greek) to whom she attributes all the racial stereotypes of the Victorian age. As Edwards and Dabydeen have noted, her descriptions of these people “would have appealed to the xenophobia of the Victorian reading public,” placing her sympathies with those she strives to align herself (169).

Seacole's narrative, however, more often reveals the instabilities of insisting on any exclusive form of cultural identity than it does convince us of the purity of her own. Her self-authorization as a British subject challenges the boundaries of cultural identification. There are many contradictions in her personality, as her patriotism and racism often conflict with her own status as a non-white woman. It is these very contradictions which pose the ultimate challenge to nationalistic rhetoric which surrounds claims to homelands. Seacole's narrative provides two important insights into the question of cultural identity: First, it offers historical insights into the conditions of colonial and post-colonial subjects whose loyalties are often divided between various homelands. Seacole's narrative confronts this dilemma by identifying herself with the colonial power, claiming a cultural heritage exceeding spatial categorization. Secondly, her narrative exposes the tensions between the imperialist ideologies of expansion and the nationalist ideologies of exclusion, which, ironically enough, came as a direct result of imperial domination.⁹ Her story reveals the unforeseen outcome of years of imperialism, as its power during the nineteenth century revealed itself to be as much a centripetal as a centrifugal force. Indeed, Seacole does not only bring “England” to New Granada and the Crimea, but she brings “Jamaica” to England. She recalls how, after visiting London for the first time, she found a ready market for her Jamaican commodities: “Before long I again started for London, bringing with me this time a large stock of West Indian preserves and pickles for sale” (4). And it is England, not Jamaica, in which she makes her home in the end and where she manages to publish and sell her book.

This claim to England as home by one the colonizer had considered an outsider to his territory reveals the instability of claims of national homogeneity in the context of imperial expansion. In her narrative, Seacole constructs a self that simulates the English subject to such an extent that she threatens the boundaries used to maintain her “otherness.” It is this potential for mimicry that reveals the permeability of such constructions. An episode near the end of her narrative demonstrates perfectly how transitory the claims to national affiliation can be. After the allied forces finally ousted the Russians from Sebastopol, Seacole lingers about the burnt buildings of the city, watching the French and Americans plunder the remains. Despite the confidence she has in her English appearance, she is nonetheless mistaken for a Russian spy and arrested. Seacole is quick to correct their mistake, “using the bell for a weapon” as she reasserts her Englishness (175-76). But such agency on her part offers her only temporary security, since the conditions of cultural identity, especially for a non-white colonial subject, never rests on firm foundations. Despite her efforts to stage herself as the pure British subject, Seacole finally reveals in the end of her narrative how England was never quite the home for her that it was for the other soldiers. After the war has ended and the time has come for everyone to return home, she confesses:

And yet all this going home seemed strange and somewhat sad, and sometimes I felt that I could not sympathise with the glad faces and happy hearts of those who were looking forward to the delights of home, and the joy of seeing once more the old familiar faces remembered so fondly in the fearful trenches and the hard-fought battlefields. Now and then we would see a lounger with a blank face, taking no interest in the bustle of departure, and with him I acknowledged to have more fellow-feeling than with the others, for he, as well as I, clearly had no home to go to.

(192)

In the end, Seacole depicts herself as a homeless wanderer, having no “fellow-feeling” with anyone except the many other migratory colonial subjects left with divided loyalties. Her narrative illustrates the contradictions involved in claiming an allegiance to a national homeland for one whose cultural and racial heritage cannot be circumscribed within a strictly nationalist discourse. If home does exist for Seacole, it is imagined outside its conventional geographical boundaries, located in a space of constant negotiation between the intersections of racial, sexual, cultural, and ideological difference.

Notes

1. With his “postmodern perspective,” Benitez-Rojo notes that “the main obstacles to any global study of the Caribbean's societies, insular or continental, are … its fragmentation; its instability; its reciprocal isolation; its uprootedness; its cultural heterogeneity; its lack of historiography and historical continuity; its contingency and impermanence; its syncretism” (1).

2. Some of the female Caribbean writers offer interesting variations of these themes of cultural identity. Works by Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, and Edwidge Danticat all deal with characters who negotiate between the cultures they inhabit.

3. Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen point out her “narrowly patriotic and romantic glorification of war” as she frequently aestheticizes the violent battlegrounds with descriptions of the beautiful colors and the excitement she felt when viewing the clashing soldiers (167).

4. See Amy Robinson's “Authority and the Public Display of Identity” for reference to this historical background, 538-39.

5. In his essay, “Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,” Homi Bhabha details the consequences of such mimicry. The desire for the colonized subject to be “almost the same, but not quite” the same as the colonizer results in a threat to that very difference the colonizer seeks to maintain. See Bhabha, 85-92.

6. Louis Althusser's articulation of the strategies of ideological interpellation might apply to Seacole's position as a subject within both the spatial and ideological dimensions of the Empire. He describes in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” an economy of power relations operating ultimately as a repressive apparatus which succeeds only through the duplication and homogenization of its subjects. As Sandra Pouchet Paquet points out, however, Seacole demonstrates certain strategies of resistance as a subject within the Empire, as she does not allow the stigma attached to her race and gender to restrict her from achieving her desires to work and travel.

7. Amy Kaplan discusses America's hypocrisy during this period as condemned European imperialistic forms of territorial domination while it employed its own version of colonial rule through its cultural and market domination. The Panama Canal's construction was one among many examples of the United States' own neo-imperialistic tactics. While this project did not involve any overt conquering of territory, it still allowed American control of a crucial trade route. See Kaplan 3-21.

8. Bill Brown describes the propagandizing of the United States' technological advances in world fair expositions and museums and points to the publicity which surrounded the construction of the Panama Canal as an example of America's desire to be seen as a leader in the expanding global market. See Kaplan 129-63.

9. Benedict Anderson traces, in his chapter entitled “Creole Pioneers,” the origins of the nation-state in the many revolutions in the Americas that erupted against colonial powers during the late eighteenth century.

Works Cited

Alexander, Ziggi and Audrey Denjee. “Editor's Introduction.” The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. By Mary Seacole. Bristol: Falling Wall, 1984. 9-45.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly, 1971. 127-86.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Relections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1993.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James E. Maraniss. Durham: Duke UP, 1992.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Plume, 1996.

Condé, Maryse. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho, 1994.

Edwards, Paul and David Dabydeen. Black Writers in Britain: 1760-1890. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991.

Kaplan, Amy and Donald E. Pease, eds. The Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Enigma of Arrival: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” African American Review 26 (Winter 1992): 651-63.

Robinson, Amy. “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Feminist Studies 20.3 (Fall 1994): 537-57.

Rhys, Jean. Wild Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1982.

Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.