Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Westward the Star of Empire: California Grapes and Western Expansion
2. The Citrus Awakening: Florida Oranges and the Reconstruction South
3. Cutting Away the Rind: A History of Racism and Violence in Representations of Watermelon
4. Seeing Spots: The Fever for Bananas, Land, and Power
5. Pineapple Republic: Representations of the Dole Pineapple from Hawaiian Annexation to Statehood
Conclusion: New Directions in Scholarship on Food in American Art

Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

About the Author

Shana Klein is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kent State University. She is the recipient of several research fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, American Council of Learned Societies, Henry Luce Foundation, and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, among others.  

Reviews

“Richly illustrated and supported with meticulous research, The Fruits of Empire demonstrates the essential need to understand the history and politics behind our food consumption. In the midst of a national reckoning with racism in the United States generally and in the arts specifically, we as art historians need to use our scholarly platforms to raise consciousness about the racist and nativist origins of our national visual culture. As Klein’s book deftly demonstrates in the context of the fruit industry, images matter. But, as she also argues, so do Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx lives.” 
*Agricultural History*

“Klein offers a concrete and approachable doorway to a discussion and study of race in America. She tells a compelling story, devoid of jargon and not requiring specialized knowledge, while still grounded in rigorous research.”
*Food, Culture & Society*

"The Fruits of Empire is a shrewdly articulated body of research. Shana Klein tells these stories with accessible panache and much conceptual originality. . . . In an enterprising new field, her book has already set an exacting standard."
*The World of Fine Wine*

“The selection of works in The Fruits of Empire leaves little place for humor, irony, or disapproval. Part of the reason for Klein’s largely deterministic interpretation may well lie in the absence of any attempt at classifying visual images and the different values and aims that propel advertisement (sales), painting (aesthetics), and photography (record). Yet, if Klein does not capture the entire, complicated story of art and imperial expansion, she tells an important and often sorry part of it.”
*Journal of Interdisciplinary History*

"The book’s strength…rests in its accessibility and relevance to readers well beyond the classroom. A captivating read, it offers clear insight into the growth of the fruit industry and the many ways in which its attendant images sowed the seeds for the rhetorical and physical violence against Asian, Black, Latinx, and women-identified people that continues to haunt the United States to this day."
*Panorama: Journal of the Associations of Historians of American Art*

"Klein’s creativity, clear prose, and thoughtful exploration of fruit and the iconography of empire have produced an excellent book."
*Journal of American History*

"This well-written, well-illustrated book perceptively analyzes visual depictions of fruit and fruit cultivation from the nineteenth century to our own time."
*Diplomatic History*