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

1. Banana, Banana, Banana
Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano and Juanita Solano Roa

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
Olga Isabel Acosta Luna

3. Most Delicate: Representations of Musaceae in Vicente Albán’s Quito Series
Sonya Wohletz

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
Tamara Díaz Calcaño

5. Dangerous to the Unacclimated: Bananas in U.S. Investor Manuals on Cuba after the Spanish–American War
Lee Sessions

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
Liliana Gómez

7. Making the (Archival) Violence of the United Fruit Company Visible
Kevin Coleman

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
Lesley A. Wolff

9. Points North: Signifying Capacities of Bananas in the Haitian Diaspora
Peter L. Haffner

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
Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto

11. Un-Stilling Still Lives: A History of Art and Bananas in the Work of Moisés Barrios
Shana Klein

12. Seeing Red in Yellow: The Gender Politics of the Blood Banana in Central American Art
Jeannette Martinez

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
Anamaría Garzón Mantilla

14. Colonial Vision: Bananas, Gold, and the Extractive View in the Art of Leandro Katz and María José Argenzio
Max Gruber

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
Annie Mendoza and Tashima Thomas

16. Plátano Power: Subversion and Swagger in Latinx/e Art
Susanna V. Temkin

Biography

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.