An accumulated wrong: Roger Casement and the anticolonial moments within imperial governance

Abstract

Taking three moments of governance-executive, legislative, judicial-this paper explains how forms of anticolonial critique were composed and articulated within the general regime of imperial rule. Through the career of Roger Casement, this paper shows how international human rights could develop out of the administration of empires as they monitored and compared the treatment of their own subjects in other imperial spaces. Casement drew particularly on his Irish heritage to identify the expropriation of direct producers as the basis of colonial rule. For Casement, colonialism was coeval with the destruction of native life. This was a far more systematic critique than was typical in commentary on the evils of colonialism. It finally impelled Casement into open rebellion giving him one last opportunity, from the dock as a convicted traitor, to make public an anticolonial epistemology that challenged the legitimacy of imperial sovereignty.

History and philosophy of geography I: Decolonising the discipline, diversifying archives and historicising radicalism

“…As for the former British colonies, anti-colonial authors are increasingly addressed by geographers (Davies, 2019; Legg, 2019b). Gerry Kearns and David Nally analyse the case of Roger Casement, whose report on Congo sought ‘to make public an anticolonial epistemology’ (Kearns and Nally, 2019: 1), showing the possibility of ‘anticolonialism at the hearth of empire’ (Kearns and Nally, 2019: 10). Hannah Fitzpatrick has studied the complex agencies surrounding the making of the maps used in the partition of India and Pakistan, showing heterogeneous uses of colonial and anti-colonial mappings (Fitzpatrick, 2019).…”

Colonial testimony and the spaces of anticolonial critique

“…But a full account of dissent as situated practice must also recognise the opportunities for an oppositional politics to flourish within the spaces of governance itself (cf. Kearns and Nally, 2019).…”