"The Right Woman in the Right Place": Mary Seacole and Corrective Histories of Empire

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, the 1857 autobiography and war memoir by Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, has had a long and prolific afterlife in British and Caribbean public imaginations. This article traces the corrective histories deployed to reorder Seacole's narrative into more contemporary political frameworks of anti-racism, multiculturalism, and humanitarianism. In doing so, this article lays bare the constructions of postcolonial black experience and emphasizes the complex experiences of black women in the diaspora. This includes a recognition of the limits of current conceptual frames of inclusion, agency, and resistance in black postcolonial studies and studies of empire.