Anality in the Colonial Archive

Abstract

This essay establishes points of contact between Sigmund Freud’s research on the anal-sadistic stage of infantile sexuality in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Irishman Roger Casement’s contemporaneous sexual practices in Peru while he investigated a colonial rubber enterprise for its gruesomely violent punitive practices against colonized peoples. The pairing of Freud and Casement elucidates a theory of colonial archivization evinced in Casement’s notorious Black Diaries and in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and “Wolf Man” case history. The author argues for a retooling of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic for archival work on queer pasts by sidestepping the familiar terrain of melancholic loss in favor of the ambivalent, defiant function of anal sexuality and its peculiar encryption strategy.