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This chapter explores Roger Casement’s deployment of queer aesthetics in the context of the international fight for human rights. Until now, scholarship has considered Casement’s work against imperialist brutalities and for the development of human rights as irreconcilable with the infamous homoerotic writing of the so-called Black Diaries. This chapter argues that the homoerotic writings are important supplements to the human rights work that enable us to enlarge the scope of just what humanitarianism might mean. Furthermore, by situating Casement’s work within the trajectory that extends from Wilde to Joyce (who is addressed in the subsequent chapter), this chapter suggests that queer culture is a vital tool in the construction of Ireland’s relation to the international.

The introduction establishes the historical, cultural and theoretical contexts and frameworks that guide the monograph. While the aim of this study is to engage with and entertain the illuminating possibilities of Casement’s notoriously amorphous legacy, rather than attempt to assert any definitive biographical narrative, tracing the contours of Casement’s extraordinary life is necessary if we are to fully appreciate the complex contradictions that shaped Casement’s existence. To this end, a concise but thorough overview of Casement’s life is offered in the first part of the introduction in order to lay important foundations for the project’s literary discussion and analysis.

This chapter examines Joyce’s inscription of Roger Casement in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. In particular, it argues that Joyce figures through Casement both a complex critique of British imperialism that avoids the pitfalls of reactionary nationalism and a progressive model of national affiliation and belonging. The chapter suggests that Casement’s homoerotic writings and his “Speech from the Dock” are important, if oblique, references for Joyce, who glimpses in them a progressive worldview.

This chapter explores Casement’s afterlives in drama, arguing that the intermedial recycling of various aspects of Casement’s life, legacy and politics continue to fascinate dramatists. The first play discussed is George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) and, reading Shaw’s play alongside copious archival sources, this chapter seeks to assess the extent of the relationship - political, historical and imaginative - between Shaw and Casement. David Rudkin’s radio play, Cries from Casement as His Bones are Brought to Dublin, uses the power of voice and accent to eruditely and creatively stage Casement’s contradictory and evolving sense of identity. Finally, this chapter explicates how Martin McDonagh’s use of Casement in The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) is glancing but powerful, testifying to the power that Irish history can continue to hold on contemporary politics, even if it is misunderstood and misplaced.

This essay performs an analysis of the highly controversial and rarely studied personal diaries of this Irish diplomat and traveler. Within the Black Diaries it is possible to find the description of bodies in intense suffering, of dismemberments, torture, and death, alongside descriptions of beautiful near-perfect bodies that provide the narrator with moments of intense pleasure. These are, to a certain extent, the same bodies; bodies of indigenous peoples living in the Casa Arana’s reign of terror. Reconciling the simultaneity of bodily pain and pleasure in this writing is one of the centers of Uriarte’s analysis, which links the Black Diaries to the more traditional utopian discourse about Amazonia of which the myths of El Dorado ––and the violence the promise of untapped, virginal riches provoked––are a significant part.

With a focus on the Amazon diaries of Roger Casement and the testimony of West Indian labourers in the Putumayo, this chapter examines literature from the Rubber Boom. In particular, it considers the intersection between fact and fiction in representations of extreme violence in this period, including in The Weeping Wood by the German Jewish émigré writer, Vicki Baum and El sueño del celta by Mario Vargas Llosa. The question of tropical degeneration, and the extent to which it was seen as responsible for the atrocities of the Rubber Boom, is discussed in the second half of the chapter.

The monograph concludes with a coda exploring the multiple centenary events celebrating Roger Casement’s afterlives that took place in Ireland in 2016, as part of Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations. Rather than offer a conclusion that forecloses our understanding of Casement’s afterlives, this coda gestures towards his continued relevance to cultural memory, cosmopolitan consciousness and the rapidly changing political landscapes of the British and Irish isles. These performances and exhibitions shed fascinating light on the unfinished role that Casement plays within Irish culture and self-fashioning, capturing a range of artistic responses to his afterlives at a key moment in Irish history.

This final section includes Gore-Booth’s writings in relation to Irish nationalism. Although not generally remembered as an Irish nationalist, the writings in this section reveal Gore-Booth as dedicated to the cause of Irish independence. This devotion was often expressed in her poetry, evident in the first two entries in this section. However, her main political writings on this topic do not begin in earnest until after the Easter Rising of 1916. The Rising was to have a deep impact on Gore-Booth’s personal and political life.

This chapter will focus on two parallel encounters, separated by some fifty years, through which natives from the Putumayo were reduced to ‘spectacle’: the first is the case of two young men brought by Roger Casement to London in the summer of 1911, and photographed and painted; the second relates to a family from an ‘unknown’ Putumayan tribe which, in 1969, was accused of cannibalism and put on public display in the town of La Pedrera, along the Caquetá River. The story of this family has been recorded by Germán Castro Caycedo in Perdido en el Amazonas (1978). Both instances confirm the visualism of anthropological material on the Putumayo, as well as the performative nature of ‘colonial’ relations in the region which, even in the late 1960s, continued to determine the behaviour of both white outsiders and indigenous subjects.

This chapter demonstrates how broadcasting catalysed significant revisions to W. B. Yeats’s theories of orality and literacy in his late poetry. Positioning three poems—’Roger Casement’, ‘Sweet Dancer’, and ‘The Curse of Cromwell’—in their radio contexts reveals how Yeats’s broadcasts create an alternative space between private and public spheres that allows the love lyric to become an oral genre and the ballad to become increasingly literary. The scripts within which these poems were broadcast framed the auditory audience by first evoking traditional spaces for oral poetry, such as the Greek stage, the ‘poet’s pub’, and the ‘poet’s parlour’, and then showing the impossibility of these spaces for modern poetics.