Mary Seacole’s plant matter(s): vegetal entanglements of the Black Atlantic in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a new reading of Mary Seacole’s autobiography from the perspective of material ecocriticism. The Black Atlantic origins of Seacole’s pharmacopoeia reveal a troubled, complex engagement with histories of medicine and cure, with local indigenous knowledges, and with the often-violent circulation of plants and people across the planet. Paying close attention to instances in the text when plants meld and move with humans, within and beyond the Atlantic medical complex, the article links together vegetal materiality and medical, botanical histories of slavery, the plantation, and resistant black ecologies. To foreground the vibrant plant-human encounters at work in the text, the article selects three plants from Seacole’s medicine chest and follows their routes across the Black Atlantic, articulating how Seacole used her pharmacopoeia to save white Anglo patients while inadvertently addressing the long histories of slavery and colonialism.