Translations in Green: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Vegetal Turn

Abstract

This paper explores the coloniality of botany and its transnational genealogy by examining critical questions about agency of representation of botanical nomenclature. We use two examples—Hortus Malabaricus in the seventeenth century, and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) from the twenty-first century—as bookends to examine the legacies of colonial botany. The Hortus is a comprehensive treatise developed by Hendrik van Rheede, the governor of Dutch Malabar, with the help of local botanists, doctors, and physicians. It remains one of the most comprehensive works on the flora of Asia and the tropics. The impetus for the Hortus was the desire for a catalogue of local plants so colonists could more efficiently extract the rich botanical resources in Asia. The TKDL is a digital repository of traditional knowledge of India. The impetus was to establish prior use of herbs and medicines in India and challenge global biopiracy of traditional Indian knowledge. Both the Hortus and the TKDL are repositories that respond to colonial regimes of power—the former for more efficient colonial extraction, and the latter to thwart it. Yet both are caught up in Western norms of botanical nomenclature. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and transnational studies, this paper examines the two moments to explore the enduring and shifting meanings of transnational colonial regimes of power.