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
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.
“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*
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