Corporate Crossings: The United Fruit Company and the Transmission of Settler Colonial Common Sense

• In Event: Making Colonial Domination Incomplete: Indigenous self-determination in contexts of capitalist expansion and violence

Abstract

In this paper I make an assessment of the United Fruit Company photograph collection, arguing that while it showcases the work of the company as a technical and scientific achievement, its ideological core centers on varying notions of “the native.” The collection shows the different ways in which north American settler colonial logics were transmitted through one of the most powerful transnational corporations of the twentieth century. This included perceptions of indigenous lands as frontiers, waste spaces, and lands of opportunity. Railroads and photography were central in fostering this perception, while the union of anthropology and photography offered a way of seeing nonwhite others as generalizable types. This took place within a shift in imperial discourse from civilizational dissemination to scientific order—from the civil-savage binary to the modern-primitive binary. A notion of the native as backward and of the past created a visual definition of what was modern and asserted the corporation as a maker of progress. Another notion of the native asserted white aboriginality and therefore a natural right to American lands as property and a greater right to conduct business in the Americas than European competitors. And yet another notion of the native emphasized racial distinctions among indigenous peoples, white north Americans, Caribbean peoples, and Latin Americans based on various eugenic discourses. These different notions of the native carried with them settler colonial logics that structured day-to-day interactions, perceptions of peoples and lands, and violence over those lands.

Author

• Balraj Gill, Harvard University