Other-Than-Human: Thinking Like the Forest Gardens

Founded in 1884, Malaysia’s Penang Botanic Gardens is one of the world’s oldest surviving British colonial botanic gardens. Built for research and to grow horticultural products, the Gardens have largely been repurposed for exercise, foraging and placemaking. Through the cohabitation of humans and other-than-human beings in the landscape, Penangites, with their complex migrant histories, have localised these foreign colonial lawns. This process occurs through the disruption and manipulation of authoritative power and coloniality, thus forming a personally and locally relevant space in which several codominant narratives exist besides that of the Colonial. Plural ontologies are not necessarily predicated upon only the modern interests of science, politics and economics, but also draw from the experiences of and meanings for locals and their lived realities. This ethnographic exploration of peoples’ worlds lends legitimacy to the other-than-human beings in this “colonial” landscape, who serve as important actants in conservation, land ownership and placemaking in their own ways. The interactions between humans and these emergent socialities confer subversive gazes, forming collective memories that disrupt present-day state authority. I argue that the preservation of colonial spaces, which have otherwise been problematised, also preserves locally relevant meanings. Decolonial erasure, as a coloniser’s agenda, can take on neocolonial colours.