“Nurse Flora, in Jamaica” and Her Afterlives

Abstract

This article responds to the twin impulses of anticolonial literary and cultural studies of the Caribbean to create counter-archives that demonstrate the significance of colonized peoples and spaces to global modernity and to forge cultural memory from what Orlando Patterson and Derek Walcott call an “absence of ruins.” Taking a long historical view of one image, “Nurse Flora, in Jamaica,” from Maria Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, the article examines the image’s literary and visual afterlives from 1801 to the present day in order to show what the iterations of Flora reveal about our current approaches to archiving colonial images and texts, and to interrogate the processes and problems of representation that animate colonial histories.