Michael G. Cronin

Pain, Pleasure, and Revolution: The Body in Roger Casement’s Writings

In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt traces the genealogy of those forms of systematic terror inflicted on Europeans by their own states during the twentieth century, particularly during the Second World War, back to practices first implemented by Europeans on their colonial subjects at the turn of the century.1 For Arendt, the age of empire inaugurated the internationalisation of capital, when capitalist relations transcended the geographical and social boundaries of the nation and the moral boundaries of bourgeois liberal ideology. As a result, the concept of progress was eviscerated in the bourgeois imaginary and was no longer conceived as a dialectical and revolutionary process but in overtly racialised evolutionary terms. The two official Reports which Roger Casement produced for the British Foreign Office on conditions in the Belgian Congo (1904) and in the Putumayo region of Amazonia in South America (1911) are among the most striking contemporary critical diagnoses of this condition. These were two of the major areas of rubber extraction at the time, and Casement investigated the enslavement and exploitation of the native populations by the rubber industry in both places.

Empire’s wake: postcolonial Irish writing and the politics of modern literary form

cially gathers momentum in the second half as Zabus brings the force of her historical insights to bear upon her analyses of contemporary texts by Unoma Azuah, Biyi Bandele, Mark Behr, Jude Dibia and Shamim Sarif among others. The closing sections explore how recent testimonials – including, for instance, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde’s Black Bull, Ancestors and Me (2008) – relate the embodied experience of desire to different and sometimes conflicting discursive frameworks and epistemological systems, and help to illustrate, with great delicacy, the complexity of same-sex expression and identity formation in Africa today. While she does not overlook prejudice, Zabus gracefully relates the pleasures of sex in the texts under discussion and, in this way, provides a refreshing counter-perspective to the negativity arising from the recent, dismaying legal initiatives to curb and punish same-sex expression in Uganda and Nigeria.

Clubs, Closets and Catwalks: GAA Stars and the Politics of Contemporary Irish Masculinity

In October 2009 Donal Og Cusack published his autobiography, Come What May. In the following weeks this event received exponentially greater coverage in the Irish media than would usually be accorded to a sports memoir. There were several salient reasons for this. Since 1999 Cusack had been goalkeeper with the Cork hurling team, one of the few teams considered capable of challenging the dominance of Kilkenny in the national championship; they had won the All-Ireland Final in Cusack’s inaugural year and again in 2004 and 2005. But along with their success his team had also become noteworthy for their disputes with the governing board of the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) in Cork. The team had twice gone on strike to demand better conditions for players and to protest at what they saw as ineffective management. The second of these strikes, in the winter of 2008–9, had been particularly protracted and bitter, and Cusack, along with his colleague Sean Og O hAilpin, emerged as the chief spokesperson for the players. This role augmented his ongoing advocacy for GAA players on a national level through the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), of which he is Chair. Hence Cusack had an unusually high profile, not only as a leading player, but also for his engagement in GAA politics. Nevertheless the publication of his book mainly generated such widespread interest, far beyond the usual confines of sports coverage, because he spoke publicly for the first time about being gay.