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

除了帮助建立一个有效的香蕉和热带水果的全球市场外，联合水果公司还是20世纪第一批将加勒比海和中美洲纳入美国势力范围的全球公司之一。到目前为止，它的历史大多是从政治史的角度来讲述的，而一些重要的方面被忽视了，包括媒介史和通过视觉配置新知识秩序的历史。位于哈佛商学院的联合水果摄影档案馆（1891年至1962年）见证了这些历史。摄影档案是讨论摄影作为一种决定性知识和全球交流形式，以及通过挑战既定的现代化叙事来研究视觉作为加勒比现代化手段的非凡来源。从文化批评的角度来看，该项目旨在验证公司档案的摄影和社会类别。通过观察照片的视觉机制，它旨在考虑控制现代社会调节过程的不同形式的知识生产和流通。公司的照片档案和相关的其他照片收藏（如美国农业部）提供了对这些医学探索和发展的新过程的知识部署形式的见解，以及对感知和表现模式的形成的见解，这些模式构成了可视化热带的新方式。因此，该项目旨在提供对照片的仔细阅读，并提出档案的民族志，这有助于破译公司的知识历史。这也将是第一次全面研究整个联合水果公司的照片收藏，这还没有作为一个集合进行研究。

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.