Bananas, Art, and Visual Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean

Through a diverse collection of essays on the history of art of the Americas, this book explores the cultural, political, and environmental legacy of bananas from viceregal painting and nineteenth-century photography to contemporary Latinx and Caribbean Art. Through sixteen original essays by leading art historians, this anthology traces the banana's remarkable journey from colonial still lifes to contemporary installations. The collection examines how artists have deployed this tropical fruit to challenge imperial narratives, visualize labor struggles, and reclaim cultural identities. Expanding on the award-winning digital humanities project Banana Craze, this volume presents a comprehensive analysis of banana imagery across diverse media-religious murals, archival photographs, avant-garde paintings, and performance art. Each chapter illuminates how artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas have transformed this ubiquitous commodity into a complex visual metaphor that speaks to histories of exploitation, ecological devastation, and artistic resistance. This book will appeal to scholars of art history, visual culture, Latin American and Caribbean studies, postcolonial theory, and environmental humanities. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano is an art historian, researcher, and cultural manager interested in the relationships between art, sustainability, and food studies in Latin America and the Caribbean. She holds a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts (NY). She is based in Madrid, Spain. Juanita Solano Roa is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Art History Department at the University of the Andes. She is a researcher focused on photography in Latin America and modern and contemporary art. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU). She is based in Bogotá, Colombia.

1. Banana, Banana, Banana Section I: From Ornament to Nourishment: Painting Bananas in the American Viceroyalties 2. Beyond the Fruit Bowl: Bananas Described and Painted in the American Viceroyalties 3. Most Delicate: Representations of Musaceae in Vicente Albán's Quito Series Section II: Picturing Bananas, Picturing the Nation: Constructing National Identities during the Long Nineteenth Century 4. La mancha 'e plátano: The Representations of Plantains in Puerto Rico during the Long 19th Century 5. Dangerous to the Unacclimated: Bananas in US Investor Manuals on Cuba after the Spanish-American War Section III: The Long Shadow of the Banana Empire: Traces of the United Fruit Company's Photographic Archive 6. Archive Matter: Upheavals and Resurgent Photographic Archive 7. Making the (Archival) Violence of the United Fruit Company Visible Section IV: Unpeeling Tropical Myths: Race, Gender, and Spirituality in Banana Imagery (1940s-1980s) 8. The Social, the Spectral, and the Sensual: The Gastropoetics of the Banana in the Ofrendas of Olga Costa and Elena Climent 9. Points North: Signifying Capacities of Bananas in the Haitian Diaspora Section V: Beyond the Banana Republic: Resisting Authoritarianism and Violence from Central America to Brazil 10. Yes, We Have Bananas: Art and Politics in the 1960s Brazil 11. Un-Stilling Still Lives: A History of Art and Bananas in the Work of Moisés Barrios 12. Seeing Red in Yellow: The Gender Politics of the Blood Banana in Central American Art Section VI: Toxic Harvest: The Environmental Cost of Banana Plantocracies in Contemporary Art 13. The Forms of Extraction: Banana Plantations, Modernization, and Social Unrest in Ecuador 14. Colonial Vision: Bananas, Gold, and the Extractive View in the Art of Leandro Katz and María José Argenzio Section VII: Embodied Politics and the Banana Imaginary: Challenging Neocolonial Fantasies in Contemporary Art 15. Bananas and Blackness: Contemporary Conflations in the Work of Liliana Angulo Cortés and Gonzalo Fuenmayor 16. Plátano Power: Subversion and Swagger in Latinx/e Art