Displaying Violence and the Violence of Display: Durable Modern/Colonial Worldviews and the Production of Alterity in a Botanical Garden in Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract

In a way that challenges the nature/culture divide which marks Western thought, this article examines how a botanical garden in Portugal was and is implicated in different yet intertwined modes of violence, given the histories it is connected to and current museological strategies. The focus of the analysis is the Tropical Botanic Garden of the University of Lisbon in Belém, which contains living and non-living collections derived mainly from its twentieth-century histories. At that time, it was used as the Colonial Garden and it housed part of the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, which included a display of actual people from the colonies. The narratives produced there today reflect an effort to confront some of these histories, while revealing the ongoing durabilities of modern/colonial worldviews.