Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (American Encounters/Global Interactions) [Paperback]

Steve Striffler (Editor), Mark Moberg (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 20, 2003 | Series: American Encounters/Global Interactions

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

“As the first tropical fruit to fit into both a middle-class U.S. breakfast and a workingman’s lunchbox, bananas—yellow, soft, and innocent—were a slightly comical, faintly suspect, always welcome by-product of the Yankee imperial reach. These essays illuminate some of the geopolitical, environmental, and human costs of the banana’s enormous everyday popularity.”—Sidney Mintz, author of Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past

“This innovative, stimulating collection brings together the best of the new work on the social, political, and cultural impact of banana exports in the Caribbean and Central and South America. The essays provide insight into the evolution of trade regimes, popular forms of contention, and the banana in the American imagination from the early twentieth century to the present. They signal new paths for comparative work on tropical commodities, corporate strategies, the interaction of multinational companies with local governments, labor movements, contract farming, growers associations, race, immigration, nationalism, dependency, globalization, and economic development.”—Catherine LeGrand, McGill University

About the Author

Steve Striffler is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Arkansas and the author of In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995 (Duke University Press), winner of the Labor Section of the Latin American Studies Association’s 2003 award for Best Book.

Mark Moberg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Myths of Ethnicity and Nation: Immigration, Work, and Identity in the Belize Banana Industry and Citrus, Strategy, and Class: The Politics of Development in Southern Belize.

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (November 20, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822331969
• ISBN-13: 978-0822331964
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #528,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bananas, August 9, 2004

By 

Chrissy "Chrissy" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (American Encounters/Global Interactions) (Paperback)

This book is well researched and very informative. A few of the essays were a little boring to me but the rest more than make up for it. My favorites were by Cindy Forster, Steve Striffler and the conclusion essay (who I forget already the writer) are excellent. These essays give you a look at not only the industry but the people involved and how a single funny fruit has shaped many peoples' way of life. This book is also interesting for the history about how a corporation can care for nothing but money and short change people, their governments and the environment as a way of doing profitable business. I gained a lot of information on how corporations as businessmen do not make wise farmers. I learned quite a bit else but I'll just say I recommend starting with Striffler's essay because it reads as a really good story.