Visualization and Visibility of the Caribbean. Photographic Archives between Knowledge Production and Geopolitics (1890-1940)

• Applicant: Dr. Liliana Gómez-Popescu
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 239152883

As well as helping to establish an effective global market for bananas and tropical fruits, the United Fruit Company was one of the first global companies of the 20th century to bring the Caribbean and Central America into the sphere of influence of the United States. Until now, its history has been told mostly from the viewpoint of political history, and some important aspects have been neglected, including the media history and the history of the configuration of a new knowledge order through the visual. The United Fruit photographic archive (1891 until 1962), located at the Harvard Business School, bears witness to these histories. The photographic archive represents an extraordinary source for discussing photography as knowledge dispositive and as a form of global communication, as well as for studying the visual as a means of modernizing the Caribbean by challenging established narratives of modernization. From the vantage point of cultural criticism the project aims to verify the photographic and social categories of the corporate archive. By looking at the visual regime of the photographs, it aims to consider different forms of knowledge production and circulation that governed the processes of modern social regulation. The photographic archive of the company and related other photographic collections (e.g. U.S. Department of Agriculture) offer insights both into the forms of knowledge deployment of these new processes of medial exploration and development and into the formation of modes of perception and representation that constitute novel ways of visualizing the tropical. The project therefore aims to offer a close reading of the photographs and proposes an ethnography of the archive that helps to decipher the history of knowledge of the company. It will also be the first comprehensive study of the entire United Fruit Company photograph collection, which has not yet been studied as a collection.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Sergio Delgado, Ph.D.