ABSTRACT
This introduction traces the banana’s trajectory from colonial crop to charged artistic motif in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. We argue that banana imagery, long neglected in historiography, was instrumental in shaping racialized representations, denouncing labor abuses, and revealing the environmental toll of banana monoculture in the Americas. Opening with Victoria Cabezas’s Banana Thesis (1973), it shows how a seemingly absurd repetition of the word “banana” exposes the violence, racism, and geopolitical asymmetries condensed in the phrase “banana republic.” The text then sketches a longue durée history of the fruit’s movement from Southeast Asia to the Americas, its central role in plantation economies, and the rise of corporate empires such as United Fruit/Chiquita, whose labor abuses, environmental devastation, and marketing campaigns shaped global imaginaries of the “tropics.” Against this backdrop, the introduction presents the project that drives the production of this book: Banana Craze, a digital humanities, ecofeminist, and decolonial project that treats the banana as a site of memory, agency, and activist knowledge production. Finally, it outlines the volume’s seven thematic sections, which analyze how artists have mobilized the banana across five centuries: from colonial ornament to nation-building symbol, from corporate archive to critique of dictatorship, extractivism, and toxic monoculture, and from racist and gendered stereotype to diasporic and queer reappropriation. Together, the essays argue that the banana’s visual afterlives illuminate enduring entanglements between art, power, and ecology.
