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Francis Bacon produced his final draft of the New Atlantis around the years 1624-1625. Standing at the threshold of early modern thought, Bacon's text operates at the interstices of its contemporary culture and does indeed signal a desire to 'illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge'. This book presents a collection of essays that show how the New Atlantis negotiates a variety of contexts, namely literary, philosophical, political, religious and social, in order to achieve this. The narrative begins with a standard literary device. When Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, he clearly had More's Utopia in mind as a model. For all his strictures on the use of language for rhetorical effect, Francis Bacon was thoroughly grounded in the Renaissance art of rhetoric. He consciously drew on his rhetorical skill in his writings, adapting his style as occasion demanded. The New Atlantis is a text about natural philosophy which seems to offer connections at almost every point with moral and political philosophy. The book discusses two forms of natural knowledge that Bacon takes up and develops in the New Atlantis: natural magic, and medicine. The modern project is crucially dependent on two fundamental miracles: the miracle of creation and the miracle of divine revelation. The book also analyses Bacon's representations of colonialism and Jewishness in the New Atlantis has revealed. The New Atlantis raises questions concerning the relationship between censorship and knowledge.
Colonialism, Jewishness and politics 129 7 ‘Books will speak plain’? Colonialism, Jewishness and politics in Bacon’s New Atlantis CLAIRE JOWITT Francis Bacon’s Of Counsel (1625) asserts that ‘Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.’1 In other words, a counsellor – even one like Bacon, languishing on the margins of political favour – will find it easier to offer advice to his prince through the medium of the written word. A counsellor can give better advice away from the intimidating presence of his monarch. Bacon’s statement in Of Counsel provides a
the ‘Oriental’ female compared to those of the male, as well as with the genital size and sexual prowess of African men.8 He quite explicitly exhibits the other as sexual body. In early nineteenth-century exhibitions of Saartjie Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ – like Margaret Cadmore, a Southern African extreme other – the fleshy, ‘animal’ black was represented to the eyes of Europe as a single female body. It was evidence as concrete as it was possible to obtain of the implacable physicality of the other woman.9 Under colonialism such representations of course
cringe, ‘[the] Wales of stereotypes, leeks, daffodils, look-younow-boyo rugby supporters singing Max Boyce songs in three-part harmony while phoning Mam to tell her they’ll be home for tea and Welsh cakes’ (1997) is one whose demise he would welcome. Norquay_09_Ch8 138 22/3/02, 10:04 am 139 The plays of Ed Thomas Negative or disempowering stereotypes are an integral part of political and cultural colonialism. While efforts to locate Wales within any post-colonial paradigm inevitably looks strained owing to the fact that the undeniable colonisation ‘happened seven
resist the compounded oppressions of colonialism, gender, race, class, sexuality, etc., and find at the same time that tactics of self-representation are often usefully adopted from the more established and yet compromising nationalist politics of their male counterparts. Indeed, as Kumari Jayawardena has shown, antiimperial, nationalist struggles in many parts of the world historically gave birth to (usually middle-class) feminist movements.14 Yet, even so, the exclusions imposed on women by the independent nation, especially by those nationalist brothers concerned to
, 1996), pp. 178, and 149–50. For their comments on postcolonialism’s neocolonial complicities, see also: Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 245–58, and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (New York and London: Verso, 1997), pp. 3–4, 17–21, 185–203. 33 This is the kind of material that is almost too knowingly satirised in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), especially the second part, ‘Rukhsana’. 34 See Aijaz Ahmad’s remarkable ‘rave’ review of Roy’s ‘overwritten
Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad argues that imperialism and its late capitalist logic cannot be resisted by recourse to a fatally derivative nationalism, but by means of a rejuvenated post-Soviet socialism (1992: 287–318). Colonialism’s other, however, was never merely nationalism and/or socialism, but a spatial imagination which it had to reconfigure in its own controlling terms. Its ally in this ideological task was an historicism which naturalised colonialism’s own way of seeing and which blocked oppositional discourses. But a backwards glance at the cultural history of
’s analysis and Spivak’s question pressurise intellectually radical discourse that avows to be from ‘below’, in two distinct ways. For Memmi, the conditions of colonialism and the post-colonial outstrip the capacities of the scholarly, so that the possibility of finding an adequate, Norquay_03_Ch2 31 22/3/02, 9:46 am 32 Theorising identities conceptual and historical framework for the (post-)colonial is always archaised and shut off by the place in which that framework must be articulated. For Spivak, the critical voice (or any voice which speaks ‘about’ the colonised
was benign, and based on a belief in fairness and justice. GLEN knew that there were real and positive traditional Irish values, arising from the struggle against colonialism and for civil, religious and economic rights, which could be activated, and the demand for equality was attuned to this heritage.56 9780719075636_4_002.qxd 30 16/2/09 9:23 AM Page 30 Contexts Tradition is invoked here as the driving force of radical social change, and there is a perceived commonality between nationalism and other forms of activism in the long historical struggle against
Third World fiction after the Second World War that the fictional uses of “nation” and “nationalism” are most pronounced.’ He goes on to say that, following the war, English social identity underwent a transformation based on its earlier imperial encounters. Colonialism in reverse created ‘a new sense of what it means to be “English”’ (1990: 46–7). However, Brennan does not consider what changes have been wrought on that society, what reinventions of tradition have manufactured new Englands of the mind, alongside the pronouncements of newly forged nationalist