Written by Matthew Plishka, Ph.D.
Every year, over 100 billion bananas are consumed globally. In 2021, the average American ate 26.87 pounds of bananas a year, or roughly 100 bananas. Bananas are everywhere. The vast majority of those bananas, especially in the United States, are Cavendish bananas, which since the 1950s has been the nearly ubiquitous commercial banana variety. But this was not always the case. From the late-nineteenth century, when bananas started to become a household staple, through the first half of the twentieth-century, nearly all commercially sold bananas were of the Gros Michel variety. Millions of those came from Jamaica. While Central and South American countries are today the predominant banana exporters, during the era of the Gros Michel, Jamaica was the world’s leading banana exporter. But the ubiquity of the Gros Michel, and of Jamaica as a banana exporter, came crashing down due to a soil-based fungus known as Panama Disease. My research explores this multispecies story of the history of Panama Disease in colonial Jamaica.
I’ve been writing about the Jamaican banana industry for nearly ten years. My undergraduate thesis examined the birth and development of the industry, looking at how Afro-Jamaican small farmers spearheaded the rise of the industry before it was co-opted by the Boston Fruit Company, the precursor to the United Fruit Company. My master’s thesis at the University of Chicago examined the first decade of the twentieth century, when a number of sugar planters in Jamaica, frustrated at the attention the banana industry had begun receiving by the British colonial office, began demanding annexation to the United States in the hopes that the U.S. would help revitalize the declining sugar industry. My dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh turned the focus to the spread of Panama Disease upon its discovery in Jamaica in 1911, how it turned Jamaica from the world’s leading banana exporter to an afterthought in the global banana trade, and how it affected the livelihoods of those who relied on the banana trade for much of their income.
In my dissertation and my work in progress manuscript, Battling Banana Blight: A Multispecies History of Jamaica’s Long Green Revolution, I approach the topic of Panama Disease through a multispecies perspective, exploring how an assemblage of people, plants, and microbes shaped this period in Jamaica’s history. Instead of focusing solely on the response of Jamaican growers and government officials to the disease, a multispecies approach means highlighting the role of pathogens and plants. It was the fungus’ ability to survive on boots, cutlasses, and remains of plants and move across the island with these items as well as its ability to easily infect and spread to Gros Michel banana plants that set the parameters within which Jamaicans could respond. For the plants, it was the susceptibility of banana plants, the ease at which they could blow over from wind, and their asexual reproduction that further facilitated disease spread and made the job of containment much more difficult. Rather than looking at nature and the environment as one homogenous unit, a multispecies approach helps to highlight the distinct parts of nature that humans are interacting with and within.
This year, I have had the pleasure of being part of the inaugural class of the NEH Collaborative Human Postdoctoral Program at Vanderbilt. I, along with eight other wonderful postdocs positioned across the Humanities, have had the opportunity to continue our research, develop new courses, and create new seminars through the Robert Penn Warren Center. The Environmental Humanities seminar that I co-convene along with Eric Moses Gurevitch and James Pilgrim brings together graduate students, postdocs, and faculty around environment-focused research talks, invited speakers, book discussions, and film screenings. With the launch of the Climate Studies major and a series of hires of faculty who focus on the environment, it is an incredibly generative time to be researching, discussing, and teaching the Environmental Humanities at Vanderbilt.
When I’m not writing about bananas and teaching, you can find me doing whatever my dog, Otter, wants me to do. Except if he wants me to eat a banana. I don’t like the taste.