A Garden without Slavery? Visual Culture and Black Histories in the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden

Founded in 1808, the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden (JBRJ) is one of the oldest public parks and institutions of scientific research in Brazil. Originally designed for the acclimation of exotic plants, it is central to the urban-natural imaginary of Rio de Janeiro. Nineteenth-century lithographs and photographs both depicted and further inscribed its imperial spatial aesthetics, underscoring Brazil’s public image as a “civilization in the tropics.” My reading of this image culture reveals a more nuanced narrative: it casts the Botanical Garden as a site where the aesthetic transformation of landscape, botanical research, new forms of cosmopolitan sociability, and racialized labor intersected in significant ways. In this presentation, I will foreground the ways nineteenth-century lithographs and photographs circulating within and beyond Brazil characterized the garden landscape in racial terms, and underscore the ways they did (or did not) negotiate the garden’s history of slave labor.

Image: Marc Ferrez, Alameda de Palmeiras, Jardim Botânico (Avenue of palm trees, Botanical Garden), ca. 1885. Scanned glass negative. Instituto Moreira Salles