Bananas, Art, and Visual Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean
Product details
- ISBN 9781041216506
- Dimensions: 174 x 246mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
