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A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic

Amazon.com Price:  $14.99 (as of 06/05/2019 01:48 PST- Details)

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Description

In the early twentieth century, the Boston-based United Fruit Company controlled the production, distribution, and marketing of bananas, the most widely consumed fresh fruit in North The united states. So great used to be the company’s power that it challenged the sovereignty of the Latin American and Caribbean countries during which it operated, giving rise to the notion of company-dominated “banana republics.”

In A Camera in the Garden of Eden, Kevin Coleman argues that the “banana republic” used to be an imperial constellation of images and practices that used to be checked and contested by peculiar Central Americans. Drawing on a trove of images from four enormous visual archives and a wealth of internal company memos, literary works, immigration records, and declassified US government telegrams, Coleman explores how banana plantation workers, women, and peasants used photography to forge new ways of being whilst also visually asserting their rights as citizens. He tells a dramatic story of the founding of the Honduran town of El Progreso, where the United Fruit Company had one in all its main divisional offices, the upward thrust of the company now referred to as Chiquita, and a sixty-nine day strike during which banana workers declared their independence from neocolonial domination. In telling this story, Coleman develops a new set of conceptual tools and methods for the use of images to open up fresh understandings of the past, offering a model that may be applicable far beyond this pathfinding study.

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