SOURCE: Baggett, Paul. “Caught between Homes: Mary Seacole and the Question of Cultural Identity.” MaComère 3 (2000): 45-56.

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...