SOURCE: McKenna, Bernard. “‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole's England and Caribbean.” Philological Quarterly 76, no. 2 (spring 1997): 219-39.

In the following essay, McKenna analyzes the hegemony that colonizing cultures have over their conquests and the dynamic created when the colonized both accept and reject the new culture.

The English essayist William Hazlitt spoke without optimism of travel and its potential consequences.

I am one of those who do not think that much is to be gained in point either of temper or understanding by travelling abroad. Give me the true, stubborn, unimpaired John Bull feeling, that keeps fast hold of the good things it fancies in its exclusive possession … What is the use of keeping up an everlasting see-saw in the imagination between brown-stout and vin ordinaire, between long and short waists, between English gravity and French levity. … What, in short, do we obtain by...