Expanding Mary Seacole's Archive Main Menu

Knowledge Paths

38170
These are coexisting spheres of knowledge that hope to inspire newer readings of Mary Seacole and other 19th Century Caribbean subjects. Scalar provides pathways instead of website tabs as tools to host different types of multimedia content. The visitor can choose between the pathways in the suggested order or select one in their order of choice. This organization of content provides a structure to decenter the narrative and disrupt the common linear form of essays and stories, which allows the telling of Seacole’s story in a way in which her historical positionality exists at the same level of importance as the strategies with which she constructed her persona in her autobiography Wonderful Adventures.

The Cultural Path intends to provide the essential historical and cultural contextualization of the times Seacole lived in, while the contents of the other three paths present arguments based on previous scholarship and the available archival material related to her. The paths are (in)dependent in that you may choose to read all of them but they can be read on their own also, in case you have a particular interest for specific topics. Because of this structure, please bear in mind that some repetition may occur to maintain the coherence of each path. 

I construct my arguments using paths in an attempt to increase the attention to detail for each one and simultaneously create a panoramic image of the nuances in the life of the Jamaican doctress. The metaphor of "paths" is useful in this sense because it evoques the roads taken by Seacole and the act of navigating through physical spaces as well as social ones.

This page has paths:

  1. Expanding Mary Seacole's Archive and the Discursive Colonization of Black Survival Winnie Perez Martinez

Contents of this path:

  1. Cultural Path
  2. Identity Performance Path
  3. Scholar's Dilemma Path
  4. The Archive Path