Social & Political Sciences
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Coleman Kevin P.


Assistant Professor History
University of Toronto
Canada

Biography

Kevin Coleman is a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in the history of U.S.-Latin American encounters and visual culture. His recent articles and book chapters examine the intersection between photography, neocolonialism, labor history, and theorizing ways to read political subjectivities through visual archives. In his first book, A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic, he argues that the “banana republic” was an imperial constellation of images and practices that was locally checked and contested by the people of the Honduran town of El Progreso, where the United Fruit Company had one of its main divisional offices. As banana plantation workers, women, and peasants posed for pictures and, more emblematically, as they staged the General Strike of 1954, they forged new ways of being while also visually asserting their rights as citizens. Kevin Coleman is a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in the history of U.S.-Latin American encounters and visual culture. His recent articles and book chapters examine the intersection between photography, neocolonialism, labor history, and theorizing ways to read political subjectivities through visual archives. In his first book, A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic, he argues that the “banana republic” was an imperial constellation of images and practices that was locally checked and contested by the people of the Honduran town of El Progreso, where the United Fruit Company had one of its main divisional offices. As banana plantation workers, women, and peasants posed for pictures and, more emblematically, as they staged the General Strike of 1954, they forged new ways of being while also visually asserting their rights as citizens.

Research Interest

History

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