Javier Uriarte
Assistant Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, State University New York, Stony Brook
"Utopia and sexual encounters in the Amazonian frontier: reading Roger Casement's Black Diaries".
This presentation explores the connections between space, time and sexuality in the so-called Black Diaries, written by Roger Casement during his 1910 trip to the Putumayo region. These diaries include the narrations of several sexual encounters with young, mostly indigenous men. I suggest that this rhetoric of cruising can be read as a form of transforming the space of suffering, dismemberments, tortures and death that Casement was discovering (and uncovering to the world) into a space of pleasure.