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.

摘要

本文从物质生态批评的角度对玛丽·西科尔的自传进行了新的解读。Seacole 药典的黑大西洋起源揭示了与医学和治疗历史、当地土著知识以及植物和人类在地球上经常发生的暴力循环的麻烦而复杂的接触。本文密切关注文本中植物与人类融合并在大西洋医疗综合体内外移动的实例，将植物物质性与医学、奴隶制、种植园和抵抗黑色生态的植物学历史联系在一起。为了突出文本中充满活力的植物与人类的相遇，文章从 Seacole 的药箱中选择了三种植物，并沿着它们穿越黑大西洋的路线，