Leela Keshav
Projects
Writing
P005 → Archival Territories: The Co-production of Space and Knowledge in Kew’s Archives
The British imperial project required the ordering, collection, and
dissemination of botanical knowledge in its pursuit of territorial mastery. Botanical archives, as places to both organise and create knowledge related
to plants, were thus essential to colonisation. This thesis examines the
archives of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, as sites of epistemic violence,
tracing three of its eleven collections—the Herbarium, the Economic Botany
Collection (EBC), and the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB)—as a cross section
of the institution’s history.
Kew’s archives were spatial containers for the
creation, curation, and circulation of botanical knowledge, and they played a
significant role in facilitating colonial expansion. They emerged as agents of
deterritorialization, where the archive itself became a new territory housing
plants stripped of their situated ecologies. From the scale of the cabinet to the
scale of the plantation, this thesis argues that archival space and knowledge
were co-produced in the formation of a universalist rational system of
ordering and mastering ‘nature.’ It places the plantation—as both territory and
epistemology—as central to the violence of botanical colonialism.
The thesis examines how each archive sought to create replicability
in their constructions of ‘nature’ as an entity to be ordered as types, in the
case of the Herbarium; commodified as products, in the case of the EBC; and
conserved as copies, in the case of the MSB. It traces Kew’s transfer of the
rubber tree from Brazil to Britain’s colonies in Asia as a case study framing
the complex entanglements of space, climate, and knowledge within British
imperialism. In following these archival fragments, the thesis considers
names, (hi)stories, and relationalities omitted in these archives, where archival
absence becomes another form of epistemic violence.
Alongside absence, the thesis employs a philosophical framework of
epistemic violence to problematise knowledge-making processes predicated
on control and the mastering of subjects. It argues that until a universalist
epistemology predicated on mastery is dissolved, Kew’s archives remain
sites of epistemic violence. Finally, the thesis speculates on the possibility
of reterritorialization, asking how both space and knowledge require drastic
transformation in a shift toward situated, plural, and embodied ways of
knowing.
See also: A Field Guide to the Botanical Imaginary