Founded in 1884, the Penang Botanic Gardens on the Island of Penang, Malaysia, is one of the oldest surviving British colonial botanic gardens in the world. The botanic gardens were initially built by the British colonisers for the purpose of growing colonial horticultural products including but not limited to rubber, spices, orchids and ornamental trees. More than sixty years since Malaysia's independence from the English in 1957, parts of the collection of exotic species remains, but the gardens are now consumed by local visitors for other uses such as exercise, foraging, and place-making. In this thesis, I look past the historical struggles at the Penang Botanic Gardens and reveal another history. Through cohabitation with other humans and other-than-human beings in the landscape, Penangites made this foreign colonial landscape a deeply local one by disruption and manipulation of authoritative power and coloniality, a landscape in which several codominant narratives exist besides the colonial. This is a project to reveal people's worlds — worlds that are not predicated upon the modern interests of science, politics, economics &c. but that are the source of experience and meaning for the locals and make up their lived realities. Through ethnographic approaches, I intend to heighten the visibility of those worlds which, despite their wealth of experiences and knowledge, were treated as nothing more than superstitions and cultural quirks in the colonial mindset. It is a recognition of multiplicity. Many moments in the Penang Botanic Gardens, especially in the clash of conflicting ideals between curators and local visitors, demonstrate that the attachment to colonial landscapes is not problematic in the ways we have been trained to recognise as necessarily neo-colonial.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Penang Botanic Gardens","Coloniality","Place-making"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 23824