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

Via a diverse collection of essays in the history of art of the Americas, this book explores the cultural, political and environmental legacy of bananas from viceregal painting and 19th century photography to contemporary Latinx and Caribbean Art. This book will appeal to scholars of art history and visual culture.

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.