Kevin Coleman
Biographic Data
| ID | 114526 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Coleman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin |
| FAMILY NAME | Coleman |
| SIGNATURE | COLEMAN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6457-3551 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Negative Originals
The Resurrection of Raúl Eduardo Mahecha
This article tells the story of the making of Stolen Photo, a documentary film that explores the 1928 massacre of banana workers in Colombia. The film revolves around a single photograph of Raul Eduardo Mahecha, and four other leaders of the 1928 strike, to expose how capitalist modes of production engender archival violence and distort historical memory. Originally a token of friendship, this studio photograph was violently repurposed by the Uni…
Class, Relationships, and the Art of Historical Imagination
Daniel James, a preeminent historian of the Argentine working class and Peronism, has fundamentally transformed how we understand Latin American labor history. This oral history interview, conducted by four of his former doctoral students, explores the personal, intellectual, and methodological foundations of his pioneering work. James discusses his working-class upbringing in post-war England as the son of Communist Party militants, his formativ…
The Ends of Paradise
In 1635, two Spanish ships carrying enslaved Africans from many different ethnic and linguistic communities wrecked in the Lesser Antilles. These newly freed people intermarried with the Indigenous Caribs, creating a new ethnic and cultural group that now refers to itself as the Garifuna. In 1797, the British, who had won the island of Saint Vincent from the French through the Treaty of Paris in 1763, deported approximately 5,000 Garifuna to the …
Revolution and Redemption in Central America
This essay reviews the following works: The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology . By Lilian Calles Barger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 376. $34.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190695392. The Latino Christ in Art, Literature, and Liberation Theology . By Michael R. Candelaria. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. Pp. 248. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826358790. Óscar Romero’s Theological Visi…
A Flamethrower to His Image
Nine years before they torched a portrait of Oscar Romero, they killed him. On a Monday evening in March 1980, Archbishop Romero had just delivered his homily in the airy chapel of a hospital for t
Capitalism and the Limits of Photography
In this special issue, we seek to identify some of the relations between capitalism and photography. Capitalism is an economic system, a form of life, a generator of its own conditions of possibility. Photography is a mechanical means of fixing images, a space of fantasy and self-making, a medium for denouncing wrongs, a driver of desire in societies of mass consumption, and a conjurer of collectives. The contributors to this issue attempt to com…
William Walker, Liberal Imperialist
When I was in my early twenties, I traveled from Honduras to Costa Rica and stopped over in Managua for a couple of nights, one of which took me to a concert by the folksingers Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy. It was there in Managua that I first learned about William Walker, the Tennessean that had declared himself president of Nicaragua and sought to spread slavery to Central America. But there was little in my Lonely Planet guidebook that …
Practices of Refusal in Images
Historian Tina M. Campt began her career by using oral history interviews to consider the lives of black Germans under the Third Reich. Since then, she has become one of the most innovative scholars of photography. In this interview, Campt discusses her most recent book, Listening to Images, and the connections between oral history and working with archives of photographs. Campt describes how practices of dispossession link up with the ways that …
Photography and Work
In this article, we ask what makes photographs different from other kinds of historical source material. What can photographic images do that other documents cannot? And what traps lie in wait for the historian using the visual record? Our more fundamental concern, however, is with the capacity of photography to capture labor and capital. Photographs are of the concrete and specific; but capital abstracts, rendering equivalent that which was once…
An Empire of Pictures becomes Afterimages of Empire
In two recent books about images and U.S. foreign policy, imperial visuality is considered in an age of global media. With archival rigor, Sönke Kunkel examines how the U.S. government used pictures as part of its effort to integrate Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa into its informal empire. Meanwhile, taking a more meditative approach, Liam Kennedy focuses on a select group of acclaimed photographers to ask if photojournalism still has th…
Patrick Iber. Neither Peace nor Freedom
Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America moves from Joseph Stalin’s Moscow to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Washington, D.C., from Lázaro Cardenas’s Mexico City to Fidel Castro’s Havana. The leading protagonists in this Cold War story are two government front groups, the Soviet-backed World Peace Council (WPC) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Congress on Cultural Freedom (CCF). The WPC championed a peace that…
The Right Not to Be Looked At
In 1953, Life magazine sent its world-renowned photojournalist MargaretBourke-White into the mountains of Mesoamerica, where her drive to takepictures collided with a poor man’s desire not to be photographed. Examiningthis destitute man’s assertion of his right to be let alone, I argue that recenttheorizations of “the civil contract of photography” and “the right to look”need to be tempered with what is at once a more old fashioned defense of the…
Making the Empire Work
Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of…
Una Óptica Igualitaria
In an unpublished image from the 1930s, studio photographer Rafael Platero Paz embraces a white North American man near a river in El Progreso, Honduras. Both men are stark naked and cover only their genitals with leaves. They look directly into the camera. This essay examines Platero Paz’s self-portraits, found in a visual archive made up mostly of photos of peasants and banana laborers, new mothers and local merchants. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre…
Photographs of a Prayer
Drawing on photographs of the 1954 banana workers' strike in Honduras, this article seeks to demonstrate the potential of the visual archive for recovering the historical agency of the working class. Photos from the archive of a studio photographer named Rafael Platero Paz enable me to rethink the role of United Fruit Company workers in staging an event that brought the Honduran worker into being as a new political subject. The fact that every ph…
Photographing the Mexican Revolution
John Mraz is the leading expert on the history of photography in Mexico and the author of several important monographs on the topic, including Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity (2009) and Nacho López: Mexican Photographer (2003). In his most recent book, he demonstrates that the Mexican Revolution changed who could be seen in photographs, newspapers, illustrated magazines, and films, and that photography was used by …
A Camera in The Garden of Eden
In an unpublished image from the 1930s, studio photographer Rafael Platero Paz embraces a white North American man near a river in El Progreso, Honduras. Both men are stark naked and cover only their genitals with leaves. They look directly into the camera. This essay examines Platero Paz's self-portraits, found in a visual archive made up mostly of photos of peasants and banana laborers, new mothers and local merchants. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre…
José María Medina, Capitán-General y Presidente de Honduras
With the twin goals of clearing a former Honduran president’s name and of exalting archival research, John Charles Morán delivered a series of talks at the 116th anniversary of the Archivo Nacional de Honduras. Those talks became the basis for this short, readable book. Morán’s urge to protect and make accessible the historical documents of Honduras is perhaps the book’s most important contribution. His trip into the archives should be commended …
Photographs of a Prayer
Drawing on photographs of the 1954 banana workers' strike in Honduras, this article seeks to demonstrate the potential of the visual archive for recovering the historical agency of the working class. Photos from the archive of a studio photographer named Rafael Platero Paz enable me to rethink the role of United Fruit Company workers in staging an event that brought the Honduran worker into being as a new political subject. The fact that every ph…
Practices of Refusal in Images
Historian Tina M. Campt began her career by using oral history interviews to consider the lives of black Germans under the Third Reich. Since then, she has become one of the most innovative scholars of photography. In this interview, Campt discusses her most recent book, Listening to Images, and the connections between oral history and working with archives of photographs. Campt describes how practices of dispossession link up with the ways that …
Photography and Work
In this article, we ask what makes photographs different from other kinds of historical source material. What can photographic images do that other documents cannot? And what traps lie in wait for the historian using the visual record? Our more fundamental concern, however, is with the capacity of photography to capture labor and capital. Photographs are of the concrete and specific; but capital abstracts, rendering equivalent that which was once…
A Camera in The Garden of Eden
In an unpublished image from the 1930s, studio photographer Rafael Platero Paz embraces a white North American man near a river in El Progreso, Honduras. Both men are stark naked and cover only their genitals with leaves. They look directly into the camera. This essay examines Platero Paz's self-portraits, found in a visual archive made up mostly of photos of peasants and banana laborers, new mothers and local merchants. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre…
José María Medina, Capitán-General y Presidente de Honduras
With the twin goals of clearing a former Honduran president’s name and of exalting archival research, John Charles Morán delivered a series of talks at the 116th anniversary of the Archivo Nacional de Honduras. Those talks became the basis for this short, readable book. Morán’s urge to protect and make accessible the historical documents of Honduras is perhaps the book’s most important contribution. His trip into the archives should be commended …
A Camera in The Garden of Eden
In an unpublished image from the 1930s, studio photographer Rafael Platero Paz embraces a white North American man near a river in El Progreso, Honduras. Both men are stark naked and cover only their genitals with leaves. They look directly into the camera. This essay examines Platero Paz's self-portraits, found in a visual archive made up mostly of photos of peasants and banana laborers, new mothers and local merchants. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre…
Photographing the Mexican Revolution
John Mraz is the leading expert on the history of photography in Mexico and the author of several important monographs on the topic, including Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity (2009) and Nacho López: Mexican Photographer (2003). In his most recent book, he demonstrates that the Mexican Revolution changed who could be seen in photographs, newspapers, illustrated magazines, and films, and that photography was used by …
The Right Not to Be Looked At
In 1953, Life magazine sent its world-renowned photojournalist MargaretBourke-White into the mountains of Mesoamerica, where her drive to takepictures collided with a poor man’s desire not to be photographed. Examiningthis destitute man’s assertion of his right to be let alone, I argue that recenttheorizations of “the civil contract of photography” and “the right to look”need to be tempered with what is at once a more old fashioned defense of the…
Making the Empire Work
Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of…
Una Óptica Igualitaria
In an unpublished image from the 1930s, studio photographer Rafael Platero Paz embraces a white North American man near a river in El Progreso, Honduras. Both men are stark naked and cover only their genitals with leaves. They look directly into the camera. This essay examines Platero Paz’s self-portraits, found in a visual archive made up mostly of photos of peasants and banana laborers, new mothers and local merchants. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre…
Photographs of a Prayer
Drawing on photographs of the 1954 banana workers' strike in Honduras, this article seeks to demonstrate the potential of the visual archive for recovering the historical agency of the working class. Photos from the archive of a studio photographer named Rafael Platero Paz enable me to rethink the role of United Fruit Company workers in staging an event that brought the Honduran worker into being as a new political subject. The fact that every ph…
An Empire of Pictures becomes Afterimages of Empire
In two recent books about images and U.S. foreign policy, imperial visuality is considered in an age of global media. With archival rigor, Sönke Kunkel examines how the U.S. government used pictures as part of its effort to integrate Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa into its informal empire. Meanwhile, taking a more meditative approach, Liam Kennedy focuses on a select group of acclaimed photographers to ask if photojournalism still has th…
Patrick Iber. Neither Peace nor Freedom
Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America moves from Joseph Stalin’s Moscow to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Washington, D.C., from Lázaro Cardenas’s Mexico City to Fidel Castro’s Havana. The leading protagonists in this Cold War story are two government front groups, the Soviet-backed World Peace Council (WPC) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Congress on Cultural Freedom (CCF). The WPC championed a peace that…
Practices of Refusal in Images
Historian Tina M. Campt began her career by using oral history interviews to consider the lives of black Germans under the Third Reich. Since then, she has become one of the most innovative scholars of photography. In this interview, Campt discusses her most recent book, Listening to Images, and the connections between oral history and working with archives of photographs. Campt describes how practices of dispossession link up with the ways that …
Photography and Work
In this article, we ask what makes photographs different from other kinds of historical source material. What can photographic images do that other documents cannot? And what traps lie in wait for the historian using the visual record? Our more fundamental concern, however, is with the capacity of photography to capture labor and capital. Photographs are of the concrete and specific; but capital abstracts, rendering equivalent that which was once…
William Walker, Liberal Imperialist
When I was in my early twenties, I traveled from Honduras to Costa Rica and stopped over in Managua for a couple of nights, one of which took me to a concert by the folksingers Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy. It was there in Managua that I first learned about William Walker, the Tennessean that had declared himself president of Nicaragua and sought to spread slavery to Central America. But there was little in my Lonely Planet guidebook that …
A Flamethrower to His Image
Nine years before they torched a portrait of Oscar Romero, they killed him. On a Monday evening in March 1980, Archbishop Romero had just delivered his homily in the airy chapel of a hospital for t
Capitalism and the Limits of Photography
In this special issue, we seek to identify some of the relations between capitalism and photography. Capitalism is an economic system, a form of life, a generator of its own conditions of possibility. Photography is a mechanical means of fixing images, a space of fantasy and self-making, a medium for denouncing wrongs, a driver of desire in societies of mass consumption, and a conjurer of collectives. The contributors to this issue attempt to com…
Revolution and Redemption in Central America
This essay reviews the following works: The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology . By Lilian Calles Barger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 376. $34.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190695392. The Latino Christ in Art, Literature, and Liberation Theology . By Michael R. Candelaria. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. Pp. 248. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826358790. Óscar Romero’s Theological Visi…
The Ends of Paradise
In 1635, two Spanish ships carrying enslaved Africans from many different ethnic and linguistic communities wrecked in the Lesser Antilles. These newly freed people intermarried with the Indigenous Caribs, creating a new ethnic and cultural group that now refers to itself as the Garifuna. In 1797, the British, who had won the island of Saint Vincent from the French through the Treaty of Paris in 1763, deported approximately 5,000 Garifuna to the …
The Resurrection of Raúl Eduardo Mahecha
This article tells the story of the making of Stolen Photo, a documentary film that explores the 1928 massacre of banana workers in Colombia. The film revolves around a single photograph of Raul Eduardo Mahecha, and four other leaders of the 1928 strike, to expose how capitalist modes of production engender archival violence and distort historical memory. Originally a token of friendship, this studio photograph was violently repurposed by the Uni…
Class, Relationships, and the Art of Historical Imagination
Daniel James, a preeminent historian of the Argentine working class and Peronism, has fundamentally transformed how we understand Latin American labor history. This oral history interview, conducted by four of his former doctoral students, explores the personal, intellectual, and methodological foundations of his pioneering work. James discusses his working-class upbringing in post-war England as the son of Communist Party militants, his formativ…
Negative Originals
Art (13 works) · History (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Photography (7 works) · Photography and Visual Culture (7 works) · Visual arts (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Sociology (6 works)