Alison Garden | Modernism / Modernity Print+

Alison Garden is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University College Dublin Humanities Institute, where she is completing a monograph, The Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899–2016: modernism, archive, memory. Her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary literature and culture, on which she has published broadly. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission. For more about her work, see www.alisongarden.com.

Contributions

“Leaving hardly a sign—and no memories”: Roger Casement and the Metamodernist Archive

On Friday, 11th May 1923, the New York Evening Post ran an article entitled “Conrad and Casement Hut Mates in Africa.”[1] In it, the journalist John Powell detailed his encounter with Joseph Conrad and Conrad’s thoughts on his one-time friend, the former darling of the British Empire turned Irish nationalist rebel, Roger Casement. Conrad told Powell of “[h]is first impression of Casement”; a tale told “so vividly that it stands out with the clearness and blackness of a silhouette caught unexpectedly in a lonely place, casting a hint of ill omen.”[2] Despite the earlier friendship that had existed between Casement and Conrad, in the profile of Casement drawn from Conrad’s words, Casement is an unknowable, malevolent figure: