The ethico-politics of homo-ness: Beckett's How It Is and Casement's Black Diaries

In recent years, Beckett studies has taken an ‘ethical turn’ as critics have given increased attention to the status of the Other and otherness in the writer's oeuvre. How It Is, a key text for these critics, was written as Beckett was reading the newly published Black Diaries of Roger Casement, a volume that contains homoerotic content long considered scandalous for the Irish republican icon and yet offers a remarkable vision of social relations structured around sameness or what Leo Bersani calls ‘homo-ness’. Reading Beckett's novel alongside Casement's diaries reveals the significance of How It Is for thinking an ethico-politics that depends neither on the ideological foundations of the nation-state nor on critical perspectives that emphasise the primacy of difference, but rather on a fundamental reorientation of sociality. In this regard, Beckett's anti-redemptive narrative may be considered a work of penetrating utopian writing, which nonetheless reminds us of the hazards of utopian thought.     

Rare models: Roger Casement,the Amazon,and the ethnographic picturesque

In 1910 Roger Casement was sent by the British government to investigate the alleged humanitarian abuses of the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo, a disputed border zone in North West Amazonia. Casement brought more than verbal and written testimony back to London. On 26 June, some six months after he returned from the Amazon, Casement collected two Amerindian boys – Omarino and Ricudo – from Southampton docks. This paper will reconstruct the brief period that these young men spent in Britain in the summer of 1911 and assess, in particular, to what extent they were treated as ‘exhibits’ by Casement, who not only introduced them to leading members of the British establishment but also arranged for them to be painted and photographed following contemporary ethnographic conventions.