Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T11:37:58.465Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Roger Casement's Queer Archive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Squires
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Growing interest in the archive as an object of study for queer criticism justifies closer attention to the concept of provenance. For archivists, provenance imparts a fundamental measure of integrity to archival collections by certifying their origin and proper order. Record origin and order, however, rely on authorial identity to establish authenticity, placing provenance in tension with queer theories that describe subjectivity as polymorphous, not fixed. That tension leads Roger Casement's official reports on the atrocities committed against rubber gatherers in South America to use provenance as a credible—rather than strictly authentic—narrative structure for publicizing British investigations of imperial violence. Recognizing provenance as a practice of representation invites reconsideration of Casement's notorious private diaries, which document his sexual interest in large penises. Instead of simply providing evidence of homosexual identity, the diaries show how impersonal fantasy becomes a constituent part of archival practice.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 596 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Arias, Arturo. “Authoring Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self.” PMLA, vol. 116, no. 1, Jan. 2001, pp. 75–88.Google Scholar
Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Duke UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Beattie, Heather. “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women's Diaries.” Libraries and the Cultural Record, vol. 44, no. 1, 2009, pp. 82–100.Google Scholar
Blackwell, Ernley. “The Casement Case.” 15 July 1916, CAB 37/151/35. The National Archives, London.Google Scholar
Burton, Antoinette. “Archive Fever, Archive Stories.” Introduction. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Duke UP, 2005, pp. 1–24.Google Scholar
Casement, Roger. The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement's Life and Times, with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings. edited by SingletonGates, Peter and Girodias, Maurice, Grove Press, 1959.Google Scholar
Casement, Roger. Letter to Lord Dufferin. 14 Mar. 1908, National Library of Ireland, MS 13,087/1.Google Scholar
Caserio, Robert L. “Casement, Joyce, and Pound: Some New Meanings of Treason.” Quare Joyce, edited by Valente, Joseph, U of Michigan P, 1998, pp. 139–55.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, edited by Watts, Cedric, Oxford UP, 1990, pp. 101–87.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. “Joseph Conrad's Diary (Hitherto Unpublished) of His Journey up the Valley of the Congo in 1890.” The Blue Peter, vol. 5, no. 43, Oct. 1925, pp. 318–25.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham. 26 Dec. 1903. Joseph Conrad's Letters to R. B. Cunninghame, edited by Watts, C. T., Cambridge UP, 2011, letter 49, pp. 148–49.Google Scholar
Correspondence respecting the Treatment of British Colonial Subjects and Native Indians Employed in the Collection of Rubber in the Putumayo District. His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1912.Google Scholar
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Natalie Z. “On the Lame.” The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 3, June 1988, pp. 572–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dean, Tim. “The Germs of Empire.” The Psychoanalysis of Race, edited by Lane, Christopher, Columbia UP, 1998, pp. 305–29.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Prenowitz, Eric, U of Chicago P, 1995.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Markmann, Charles Lam, Pluto Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Smith, A. M. Sheridan, Pantheon Books, 1972.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Robbins, Bruce, U of Minnesota P, 1993, pp. 1–32. Vol. 5 of Cultural Politics.Google Scholar
Friedman, David M. A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. Free Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Goodman, Jordan. The Devil and Mr. Casement. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Hardenburg, W. E. The Putumayo, the Devil's Paradise; Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed upon the Indians Therein. T. F. Unwin, 1912.Google Scholar
Herbenick, Debby, et al. “Erect Penile Length and Circumference Dimensions of 1,661 Sexually Active Men in the United States.” Journal of Sexual Medicine, vol. 11, no. 1, Jan. 2014, pp. 93–101.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Inglis, Brian. Roger Casement. Hodder and Stoughton, 1973.Google Scholar
Keane, Damien. “Quotation Marks, the Gramophone Record, and the Language of the Outlaw.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 51, no. 4, Winter 2009, pp. 400–15.Google Scholar
Khan, Shahid, et al. “Establishing a Reference Range for Penile Length in Caucasian British Men: A Prospective Study of 609 Men.” BJU International, vol. 109, no. 5, Mar. 2012, pp. 740–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDiarmid, Lucy. The Irish Art of Controversy. Cornell UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, Henry. “Outcry as Secret Gay Life of Irish Hero Is ‘Proved.‘” The Observer, 24 July 1999, www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/jul/25/henrymcdonald.theobserver.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Angus. The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Anaconda Editions, 1997.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Angus. “‘Phases of a Dishonourable Phantasy.‘” Field Day Review, vol. 8, 2012, pp. 85–125.Google Scholar
Mondaini, Nicola, and Gontero, Paolo. “Idiopathic Short Penis: Myth or Reality?” BJU International, vol. 95, no. 1, Jan. 2005, pp. 8–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mullen, Patrick. The Poor Bugger's Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford UP, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muller, S., et al. Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives. Translated by Leavitt, Arthur H., Society of American Archivists, 1940.Google Scholar
Nesmith, Tom. “Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives.” American Archivist, vol. 65, no. 1, Spring-Summer 2002, pp. 24–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posner, Ernst. “European Experiences in Protecting and Preserving Local Records.” Archives and the Public Interest, Public Affairs Press, 1967, pp. 107–13.Google Scholar
Reid, B. L. The Lives of Roger Casement. Yale UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. Verso, 1993.Google Scholar
Rivera, José Eustasio. The Vortex. Translated by James, Earle K., Panamericana Editorial, 2001.Google Scholar
“Rubber Atrocities Spared No Victim.” The New York Times, 14 July 1912, p. C3.Google Scholar
Sawyer, Roger. Casement: The Flawed Hero. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.Google Scholar
Sawyer, Roger. Roger Casement's Diaries: 1910: The Black and the White. Pilmco, 1997.Google Scholar
Schellenberg, T. R. The Management of Archives. Columbia UP, 1965.Google Scholar
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Rutgers UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 26, no. 3, July 1984, pp. 467–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tóibín, Colm. “A Man of No Mind.” London Review of Books, vol. 34, no. 17, 13 Sept. 2012, pp. 15–16.Google Scholar
Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Publics and Counterpublics, Zone Books, 2005, pp. 65–124.Google Scholar
Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Princeton UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Wylie, Kevan R., and Eardley, Ian. “Penile Size and the ‘Small Penis Syndrome.‘” BJU International, vol. 99, no. 6, June 2007, pp. 1449–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wylie, Lesley. Colombia's Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the Putumayo. Liverpool UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wylie, Lesley. “Rare Models: Roger Casement, the Amazon, and the Ethnographic Picturesque.” Irish Studies Review, vol. 18, no. 3, Aug. 2010, pp. 315–30.Google ScholarPubMed