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All through the nineteenth century, Madeirans migrated from their Atlantic island to places as remote as Hawaii, California, Guyana and, later, South Africa. Scarcity of land, a rigid social structure, periodic famines and rampant poverty made many embark to uncertain destinies and endure the harsh labour conditions of sugarcane plantations. In the 1880s, a few hundred Madeirans engaged in a different venture: an experience of ''engineered migration'' sponsored by the Portuguese government to colonize the southern Angola plateau. White settlements, together with military control, scientific surveys and expeditions, contributed to strengthen the claims of European nations over specific territories in Africa. At that time, the long lasting claims of Portugal over African territories were not matched by sponsored colonial settlements or precise geographic knowledge about the claimed lands. There was little else representing Portugal than the leftover structures of the slave trade, the penal colonies and the free-lance merchants that ventured inland. In fear of losing land to the neighbouring German, Boer and British groups in south-western Africa, the Portuguese government tried then to promote white settlements by attracting farmers from the mainland into the southern plateau of Angola. As very few responded to the call, the settlement consisted mostly of Madeiran islanders, who were eager to migrate anywhere and took the adventure of Angola as just another destiny out of the island where they could not make a living. Their bodies and actions in the new place became highly surveilled by the medical delegates in charge of assessing their adaptation. The reports document what were then the idealized biopolitics of migration and colonization, interweaving biomedical knowledge and political power over displaced bodies and colonized land. At the same time, those

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Moulages are three-dimensional colorful replicas of body parts with particular expressions of ailments. Historically, by operating a transition between illness and disease, moulages were a powerful tool in the consolidation of the medical specialty of dermatovenereology. Yet, moulages are not solely an objectification of biological processes suitable for medical teaching; they also activate non-medical cognitions and emotions about life, death, behavior, and morality that are rooted in the history of the art of wax modeling. Furthermore, they provide a window into a dense history of urban health and illness, sex, law enforcement, assistance, gender, class, and politics.

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Plantation museums and memorials play different roles in coming to terms with a past of racialized violence. In this article, I briefly review the academic literature on plantations, refer to the plantation–race nexus, address the critical and acritical uses of plantation memories, discuss modes of musealizing plantations and memorializing labor, and present a community-based museum structure: Hawaii’s Plantation Village. This museum project is consistent with a multiethnic narrative of Hawai‘i, in that it provides both an overview of the plantation experience and a detailed account of the cultural heritage of each national group recruited for the sugar plantations. By providing a sense of historical belonging, a chronology of arrival, and a materialized representation of a lived experience, this museum plays an active and interactive role in the shaping of a collective memory of the plantation era, selecting the more egalitarian aspects of a parallel coexistence rather than the hierarchies, violence, tensions and land appropriation upon which the plantations rested.

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