The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion

In the wake of the Civil War, the citizenry, history, and economy of the United States were in flux. The newly reunified country had to integrate into the body politic two radically different populations: white citizens who had rebelled against the state and Black Southerners who had been born into slavery and were now free. At the same time, the nation looked to its Western territories to locate a shared past as well as to islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific that could help expand the country’s economic base and labor force. The era in which these developments took place—the 1860s through the 1940s—witnessed the failed promises of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow laws, adoption of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the Spanish-American War, the American-Philippine War, and the forced annexation of Hawai‘i. The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Era of American Expansion focuses on this pivotal time in the nation’s domestic and international relations. Rather than explicit depictions of these discriminatory policies and exploitative incursions, however, Shana Klein invites us to consider a seemingly negligible and humble subject: images of fruit.