Banana Wars

Power, Production, and History in the Americas

Autor: Striffler, Steve; Moberg, Mark; Joseph, Gilbert M.; Rosenberg, Emily S.
Editor: Duke University Press
Col·lecció: American Encounters/Global Interactions
ISBN: 9780822385288
eISBN Pdf: 9780822385288
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2003
Mes: Novembre
Pàgines: 360
DDC: 338.1/74772/098
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

Over the past century, the banana industry has radically transformed Latin America and the Caribbean and become a major site of United States–Latin American interaction. Banana Wars is a history of the Americas told through the cultural, political, economic, and agricultural processes that brought bananas from the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean to the breakfast tables of the United States and Europe. The first book to examine these processes in all the western hemisphere regions where bananas are grown for sale abroad, Banana Wars advances the growing body of scholarship focusing on export commodities from historical and social scientific perspectives.

Bringing together the work of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, and geographers, this collection reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in so doing, created unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin American and the Caribbean. The frequently abusive conditions that banana workers experienced, the contributors point out, gave rise to one of Latin America’s earliest and most militant labor movements. Responding to both the demands of workers’ organizations and the power of U.S. capital, Latin American governments were inevitably affected by banana production. Banana Wars explores how these governments sometimes asserted their sovereignty over foreign fruit companies, but more often became their willing accomplices. With several essays focusing on the operations of the extraordinarily powerful United Fruit Company, the collection also examines the strategies and reactions of the American and European corporations seeking to profit from the sale of bananas grown by people of different cultures working in varied agricultural and economic environments.

Contributors
Philippe Bourgois
Marcelo Bucheli
Dario Euraque
Cindy Forster
Lawrence Grossman
Mark Moberg
Laura T. Raynolds
Karla Slocum
John Soluri
Steve Striffler
Allen Wells

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 A Global Fruit
- The Global Banana Trade
- Banana Cultures: Linking the Production and Consumption of Export Bananas, 1800–1980
- United Fruit Company in Latin America
2 Central and South America
- One Hundred Years of United Fruit Company Letters
- Responsible Men and Sharp Yankees: The United Fruit Company, Resident Elites, and Colonial State in British Honduras
- The Logic of the Enclave: United Fruit, Popular Struggle, and Capitalist Transformation in Ecuador
- ‘‘The Macondo of Guatemala’’: BananaWorkers and National Revolutions in Tiquisate, 1944–1954
- The Threat of Blackness to the Mestizo Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Honduran Banana Economy, 1920s and 1930s
3 The Caribbean
- Discourses and Counterdiscourses on Globalization and the St. Lucian Banana Industry
- The St. Vincent Banana Growers’ Association, Contract Farming, and the Peasantry
Conclusions: Dialectical Bananas
Bibliography
Contributors
Index