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Abstract

In 1910 the British Foreign Office tasked Roger Casement, then-British Consul-General in Rio de Janeiro, with investigating reports of forced labor and systemic violence in the wild rubber extraction zone of the Putumayo. Published the following year, Casement’s official account accused Peruvian and Colombian rubber extractors of exploiting indigenous labor through abduction, torture, sexual violence, and murder. This paper probes the relationships between economic logics of labor and extraction and these spectacular extremes of violence, comparing extractors’ acts with Casement’s own political writings. Individual acts of violence in the Putumayo, while apparently anti-economic in their destruction of natural and indigenous life, ideologically appropriated all indigenous production and reproduction to the extractive system. Meanwhile, Casement’s private diaries from his expedition suggest that homoerotic desire and Irish nationalistic sentiment structured his sympathy for indigenous victims, which took public form in his imaginations of civilized rescue. I argue that rubber violence and Casement’s colonial humanitarianism both channeled individual desires into material and political forms, exemplifying the mutual production of desire and domination in early twentieth-century colonialism.

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