Word: casement
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...book’s subtitle, “One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness,” makes explicit allusion to Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, especially apt given the fact that Conrad and Casement met in 1889 in the Congo Free State. Casement’s own description of Arana recalls “the unseen presence of victorious corruption” that Marlow senses in Colonel Kurtz. “There is no doubt the brute has courage—a horrid, fearful courage...
...full up’ with atrocities and horrors,” wrote Roger Casement in a letter to the British Foreign Office in March 1911. Casement, a diplomat and activist, had just returned to London from the Amazon jungle, where he had spent several months investigating the rumoured exploitation of Barbadian workers—at that time, British subjects—by a rubber manufacturing company. The Peruvian Amazon Company, Casement found, was abusing not only its Barbadian employees, but also enslaving and terrorizing the local Indian population. In the years following these revelations, until his death in 1916, Casement...
...Devil and Mr Casement” succeeds in bringing the principal players of the story to life in brisk, unadorned prose, and with frequent recourse to historical sources. We cannot help but share Goodman’s obvious admiration for Casement, who had established his humanitarian credentials in 1903 with a report exposing the wholesale abuse of the native population—again, in the name of rubber production—of the Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium. “Wherever he went and whomever he met, Roger Casement rarely failed to make a deep...
...worrying lack of “civilization” in the Putumayo basin crops up repeatedly in Casement’s correspondence and in his 1912 report. Troublingly, though, Casement’s vocabulary goes unremarked upon by Goodman, who appears not to notice that Casement, at least in the early stages of his investigation, did not view Arana’s dealings in the Putumayo in opposition to some universal ethical standard, but to the imperial “mission civilisatrice.” Casement is dismayed, for example, that “there are no civilized authorities...
...authenticity of his humanitarian sentiment, but simply illuminate the complexity of his predicament and character. Instead, Goodman misses the opportunity to present Casement’s story as emblematic of the conflicted, traumatized, and transitional consciousness of colonial operators in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, in attributing to Casement an unalloyed concern for “human rights,” Goodman simplifies where he should have complicated: while the Putumayo revelations contributed much to the burgeoning discourse of human rights, the movement would not gain momentum until the Interwar years and beyond, as a product of the agonized transitions...