“Roger Casement’s closet”

When British imperialist turned Irish revolutionary Roger Casement was arrested on Banna Strand in Co. Kerry in April 1916, following a campaign to shore up German support for an armed uprising in Ireland, there was little evidence linking him to Germany aside from a train ticket from Berlin to the naval port of Wilhelmshaven found in a pocket of his overcoat.

As a diplomat and a public figure Casement has been meticulous about his clothes and much comment was made about his appearance during his subsequent trial and execution.

Following his investigations into humanitarian crimes in central Africa and subsequently in Peru and Colombia, Casement had published a series of damning reports that would lead to global condemnation of prevailing colonial administrations by exposing their systematic exploitation of the indigenous people and natural resources and the atrocities committed in the manufacturing of rubber for European and North American consumption.

Whilst on these expeditions Casement kept secret diaries and took thinly veiled homoerotic photographs but also collected various examples of indigenous crafts.

About 60 objects from Africa and 12 from South America survive from his collection including rare examples of textiles.

At this time Casement also developed an interest in Irish textiles and was a patron of key Irish workshops such as the Dun Emer Guild and Industries, founded in Dublin in 1902 by Elizabeth and Susan Yeats.

Whilst Casement’s diaries and photography have attracted much academic and popular interest since his death, his collection of indigenous crafts and his interest in textiles have been universally ignored.

This paper reconsiders the importance of textiles as a central tenet in Casement’s critique of colonialism in general and imperial masculinity in particular and offers a fresh perspective on the relation of the queer subcultures, in which Casement was immersed, to his humanitarian politics.