Kevin Coleman

Kevin Coleman
Associate Professor
Program
History

Kevin Coleman is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington.
His recent articles and book chapters examine the intersection between photography, agro-export economies, 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.
Click here for a list of recent publications.