Our Civilizing Mission

Front matter

NICHOLAS HARRISON

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures

Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Index

319 342

— Qu'est-ce que vous parlez bien le français !

Mes parents recevaient le compliment sans broncher ni sourire et se bornaient à hocher du chef. Une fois que les garçons avaient tourné le dos, ils nous prenaient à témoin :

— Pourtant, nous sommes aussi français qu'eux, soupirait mon père.

— Plus français, renchérissait ma mère avec violence. Elle ajoutait en guise d’explication : Nous sommes plus instruits.

‘You speak excellent French, you know.’

My parents bore the compliment without turning a hair or smiling, merely a nod of the head. Once the garçon had gone, they turned to us as witnesses. ‘Yet we’re as French as they are,’ my father sighed.

‘Even more so,’ my mother continued vehemently: ‘We’re more educated’, Maryse Condé (b. 1937, Guadeloupe) Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer: souvenirs de mon enfance (1999)!

1 Maryse Condé, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer: souvenirs de mon enfance (1999), 13; Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood, trans. Richard Philcox (London: Soho Press, 2001), 4-5.

[L’Jéducation est le moyen le plus efficace dont dispose une société pour former ses membres a son image. Certes, la famille prend d’abord Penfant tout entier, l’enveloppe de toutes parts et le façonne à sa manière. Mais qu’on songe à la révolution qui s’accomplit en lui, lorsqu'il va pour la première fois à l'école ou au lycée. Il change de manière d’être et, presque, de nature. À partir de ce moment, il y a en lui une véritable dualité. Lorsqu’il revient chez lui, ses parents sentent qu’il leur appartient de moins en moins.

Education is the most powerful instrument a society possesses for fashioning its members in its own image. Certainly, the family takes the child in its entirety first of all, envelops him wholly and forms him in its own way. But if we think of the revolutions which take place in him when he goes to school for the first time, we realize that his way of being and even almost his very nature change. From this moment onwards he contains within himself a veritable duality. When he goes home, his parents feel that he belongs to them less and less.

Maurice Halbwachs (b. 1877, France), Introduction to Emile Durkheim L’Evolution pédagogique en France (rst edition 1938; 2nd edition 1969)?

2 Halbwachs, Introduction to Emile Durkheim, L’Evolution pédagogique en France ([1938] Paris: PUF, 1969, 2nd edition), 2; Selected Writings on Education, Volume 2, The Evolution of Educational Thought, trans. Peter Collins ([1977] (London: Routledge, 2006), xii.

Toute culture est originairement coloniale.

All culture is at origin colonial.

Jacques Derrida (b. 1930, Algeria) Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (1996)

3 Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 68; Monolingualism of the Other or The Prothesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 39.

Acknowledgements

Towards the end of this book I talk a little about some of the particular experiences and preoccupations that led me to write it, but perhaps the first explanation is that I, like most academics, have spent most of my life so far in educational institutions — as a schoolchild, then a student, and eventually as a teacher and researcher (and writer of email). Part of the attraction of this project was the opportunity to reflect on my own experiences of education, and on the climate or culture around ‘humanities’ teaching today in universities such as mine, a climate that can be difficult at times. In what follows, however, such points of comparison are only occasionally explicit; and it is self-evident that the experiences of colonial education that are at the heart of the book involved conflicts and forms of hostility incomparably more difficult than anything I have ever had to face or am likely to face. I am in no doubt that I have been fortunate to have the education that I have had, and to do the job that I do.

Taking that long view, I have a good number of people to thank for helping me get to the point where I could write this book, starting with my parents (especially my mother, but my late father too), and my teachers at school and university. I was lucky enough to spend the first part of my career at Cambridge, then at UCL. For the last dozen years or so I have worked in the French department at King’s College London, where I have a remarkable group of colleagues, and I am grateful to all those, past and present, who have helped foster this sort of academic work. I should mention in particular, for conversations that have helped shaped the book, Emily Butterworth, Patrick ffrench, Simon Gaunt, Russell Goulbourne, Jo Malt, Siobhan Mcllvanney, Craig Moyes and Sanja Perovic. I have also drawn on the support of many other colleagues in and around the department, including Emma Bielecki, Jane Elderton, x Our Civilizing Mission

The Leverhulme Trust granted me a Research Fellowship to work on this project in 2015, an opportunity that arrived at a perfect moment and that I greatly appreciated. Some of my colleagues may have thought it ironic that I was taking time off to write about teaching, but, so far as I know, no-one complained. My thanks go not only to the Leverhulme Trust but to all who worked around my absence, especially Gillian Ni Cheallaigh, who took over several of my classes that year, and to Celia Britton, Pat Corcoran and Emma Wilson, who supported my application for the fellowship. I have also benefited from research leave from King’s, including a year spent in Los Angeles after a stint as head of department. Much of that time was taken up with other research projects, but my progress was helped by the excellent libraries at UCLA and by opportunities to dip into the lively intellectual communities at UCLA, USC and the Huntington. For the welcome they offered, my thanks go to Liz DeLoughrey, Olivia Harrison, Steve Hindle, Edwin Hill, Peggy Kamuf, Francoise Lionnet, Natania Meeker, Panivong Norindr and Dominic Thomas. Special thanks also to all those who were involved that year in Friends Western cooperative school in Pasadena, especially Patti Wagonhurst and Gilden Tunador, and anyone who ever called me ‘coach’.

I have tried out quite a lot of the material in seminars and conferences, and am indebted to the institutions and organizations that have hosted me during the years I was working on this project, including, besides those already mentioned, the universities of Durham, Glasgow, Kent, Leeds, Liverpool, Notre Dame, Nottingham, Oxford, Paris III, Sousse and York; SOAS; the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies; the ENS, INRP and IUFM in Lyon; Indiana University Bloomington; HKU, NYU and the Maison française in New York and Oxford. I am also indebted to the editors of Paragraph, who heard a very early version of some of the material on Edward Said; working with that group — to which I was first introduced by Chris Johnson, who is greatly missed — was a pleasure and a privilege.

Thank you to all those who have invited me to talk, offered encouragement, helped me with specific queries and led me to new insights. That includes some excellent students on our BA, MA and PhD programmes. I can’t name everyone and I am afraid I’ll forget some important people, but they include Danielle Allen, Pascale Barthélémy, Cécile Bishop, Sandra Blachon (at the Bibliotheque universitaire Ramon

Acknowledgements xi

None of the material in this book has been previously published in its present form, but I would also like to thank the editors of essay collections in which earlier versions of some of the material first appeared — Jean Bessiére, editor of Littératures francophones et politiques (Karthala, 2009); Gilles Boyer, Pascal Clerc and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, editors of L'École aux colonies, les colonies à l’école (ENS éditions, 2013); Ziad Elmarsafy, David Attwell and Anna Bernard, editors of Orientalism, 30 years on (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Ranjan Ghosh, editor of Edward Said and the Literary, Social and Political World (Routledge, 2009). I am grateful for those opportunities, and for editorial feedback. For a couple of other opportunities that have fed in more obliquely, I would also like to thank Jarad Zimbler, Ben Etherington and Rachel Bower, editors of a special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature on ‘Crafts of World Literature’ in 2014; and Chris Prendergast, editor of A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Anthony Cond at Liverpool University Press started encouraging me to write this book quite some time ago (before he knew it was this book), and his enthusiasm was infectious. Chloé Johnson, who has been my editor for the last couple of years, has showed great patience in waiting for the thing to materialize and allowing me to write more than I intended. I am grateful to both of them and to all those who have read my writing; besides those already mentioned I must thank in particular Adam Sutcliffe, who may still find Chapter 2’s approach to history-writing undisciplined, but who certainly helped me improve it; Richard Mason, who read several chapters, chatted about ideas with me and translated some of the quotations; and the four people who have read complete versions prior to this one. Lia Brozgal offered many astute remarks and significant encouragement; and the two anonymous readers for Liverpool both read very attentively, from what seemed to me quite different angles, helping me considerably through their xii Our Civilizing Mission numerous well-informed and thoughtful comments. Finally, and above all, I want to thank Elizabeth Eger, whose intellectual and emotional engagement with my work was inspiring, and helped give me confidence I had something to say.

I would like to dedicate the book to Lizzie, Emily and James.

Note on translations and citations

Throughout this book I quote French-language texts in the original then provide a translation. I make an exception if the French is so close to the English as to make translation unnecessary, or if I am repeating a quotation used earlier, in which case I quote only the English on the second occasion. I give a reference to a published translation where one is available, but have adapted published translations without indicating that I have done so. The transliteration of names and words from Arabic and other languages has not been standardized; I have adopted commonly used transliterations when using a name such as Abdelkader or a word such as Quranic, but when quoting have replicated the variations found in publications of different eras.

I give page numbers in the body of my text whenever it is clear enough which text is being cited. Where necessary to avoid confusion, I preface the page number for a published English translation with the letter E. This hybrid system of referencing means that although a few of the footnotes contain only a page reference and bibliographical information (information that appears again in the bibliography), most offer additional information, discussion or references.

Introduction

Half a century ago George Steiner wrote an essay about a sense of crisis in the humanities. Its title, “To Civilize our Gentlemen’, conjured up Victorian educational values that seem even more antiquated now than they did when the essay was published.' Eminent Victorian educationalists such as Matthew Arnold talked ‘without embarrassment’ about ‘civilizing the nation’, as Helen Small notes in her 2013 book The Value of the Humanities.2 To most people working in education today their attitudes, not least towards ‘civilization’, surely feel quite distant. The

1 George Steiner, ‘To Civilize our Gentlemen’ [1965], in Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 75-88. See also, for another classic discussion of the foundations of the discipline of modern (French) literary studies, Antoine Compagnon, La Troisiéme République des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1983).

2 Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 70. Small quotes a letter of 1862 by Arnold: ‘the State has an interest in the primary school as a civilizing agent, even prior to its interest in it as an instructing agent’ (72, Arnold’s emphasis; Letter to Mary Penrose Arnold, 5 March 1862, in The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996—2001), vol. II, 125). Arnold, Small notes (70), wrote against ‘the instrumentalist tendencies of political economists in the government’ but also came to think that ‘opposing usefulness to non-usefulness obscures and distorts much of what a sound argument about educational values ought to be concerned with — including breadth of knowledge, recognition of individual aptitudes, the “free play of the mind”, and what, without embarrassment, he called “civilizing the nation”’. For more on Arnold and colonialism see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), and Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989).

French notion of the ‘mission civilisatrice’, evoked in the title of my book, is likely to appear even more remote, and worse: a complacent mix of religiosity and ethnocentricity, embroiled in a shameful colonial history where the malignant rhetoric of the white man’s burden served as the pretext for violent conquest.’

According to Steiner’s essay, the study of English literature as an academic discipline in universities rested historically on three sets of ideas. First were particular notions of national identity, and particular forms of nationalism, which developed and came to the fore in the high colonial era. Second were assumptions about the foundational value, and the ready accessibility to the educated, of classical languages and cultures, which were further assumed to underpin the superiority of ‘Western’ culture over other cultures. Finally, and relatedly, there was a deep faith in the humanizing capacities of Western high culture.

As Steiner suggested, by the mid-1960s all three of these elements had been challenged quite fundamentally, above all in the wake of the traumas and inhumanities of colonialism, the Second World War, and decolonization. Many of the challenges had come, and continued to come in the years after Steiner wrote his essay, from politically radical sources, including feminism and anti-colonialism, whose basic tenets I and many other academics in the humanities now accept without hesitation; and they had an effect on the shape of the humanities, including the way literature is taught, what literature is taught, and what is taught alongside or instead of literature.‘ If the cultural shift described

3 The phrase ‘white man’s burden’ comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem of 1899 ‘The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands’. For a recent critique of the notion of civilization see David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences (London: Allen Lane, 2013); he concludes: ‘it is a word, a concept, a category [...] we would be much better off without’ (257). The classic critique of the notion of the ‘civilizing mission’ is Alice L. Conklin’s A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), which shows how it allowed the French to ignore ‘the fundamental contradiction between democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire’ (2).

4 In the Conclusion I will come back to issues around the selection of literary texts for teaching. I will not, however, go much further with discussions about the idea of the ‘humanities’ as such; I am using this term mainly as an academic label under which various subjects are grouped. My arguments in this book, like Steiner’s in his essay, have literature and literary study at their centre, and at some points I will talk quite specifically about literature, but I hope readers might consider by Steiner implied a certain loss of cultural and intellectual confidence, that loss of confidence seems salutary in the context of a history of imperialism, patriarchy, eurocentricity, and other salient characteristics of ‘Western’ cultures.

It is clear, then, why some critics may view a sense of ‘crisis’ in the humanities as necessary, healthy and even constitutive of work in that field.’ But it is clear too that being in crisis, or having a sense of crisis, is not always productive (especially when it is fed not only by positive intellectual energies of the sort I have just mentioned but also by some deeply negative material and political pressures).° One of the questions how far certain arguments extend into other subject areas, such as film or (at a further remove) music. On the idea of the humanities, see Small 57 and passim; and Michael Wood’s definition and discussion in Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood, trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein and Michael Syrotinski (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 120-21. For further discussion of literature and the humanities see, for instance, Marjorie Perloff, ‘Crisis in the Humanities? Reconfiguring Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century’, in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), Chapter 1; Samuel Weber, ‘Ambivalence: The Humanities and the Study of Literature’, in Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 132-52; and Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, or The University in Deconstruction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Other prominent discussions of the nature and role of the humanities, especially in the US, include Michael Bérubé, Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

5 For example, John T. Hamilton concludes his review of Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) by saying that Thomas Pfau’s book has the potential to ‘assist the present predicament of the humanities, not by resolving all crises, but rather by ensuring that the crises are maintained in all their vitality’ (Comparative Literature 68:1 (March 2016), 96—99: 98).

6 Paul Jay in The Humanities ‘Crisis’ and the Future of Literary Studies (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2014) suggests that ‘crisis’ is the wrong word for productive forms of scepticism and self-questioning and argues — and I think he has a point — that the (enduring) rhetoric of crisis is itself debilitating. He also offers a strong defence of the teaching of literature. Christopher Breu, in a review of Jay’s book (College Literature 42:2 (Spring 2015), 348-51: 349), emphasizes that the real threat behind this book is where all of that has left us with regard to the teaching of the humanities. My perception is that, for some time now, certain forms of self-doubt have pushed many critic-teachers — notably, for the purposes of this book, those in or influenced by the field of postcolonial studies, though certainly not only them — towards paradoxical and self-contradictory positions, particularly in relation to education.’

to the culture of the humanities is neoliberalism, and lists the damaging effects, in the US and beyond, of ‘for-profit education institutions, textbook companies and their lobbies, careerist higher administrators, outside efficiency consultants, educational think tanks and NGOs, or state and federal politicians who are thoroughly convinced by neoliberal solutions’, including ‘things like the growth of non-tenure-track labor, the wholesale destruction of shared governance, the war of attrition on tenure, and the disproportionate growth of upper administration’. All of that is part of the context for my own work, and undeniably of central importance to the sense of crisis in the humanities today, but I will not address those issues explicitly in this book. Incidentally, although I agree with Breu’s analysis of neoliberalism, I think he is unfair to suggest that Jay presents the problems afflicting the humanities as ‘merely a product of the rhetoric of crisis’ (349, my italics).

7 I would see some of the work of Pierre Bourdieu as another important example of this sort of conflicted attitude; and the book he co-authored with Jean-Claude Passeron in 1970, La Reproduction: éléments pour une théorie du système de l’enseignement, was influential among a significant group of academics for its articulation of a negative view of education, and perhaps especially French/ literature lessons, as ‘une violence symbolique en tant qu’imposition, par un pouvoir arbitraire, d’un arbitraire culturel’ (19, ‘symbolic violence, in that it means the imposition of something culturally arbitrary by an arbitrary power’, 5). I will not say much about Bourdieu in this book; Leon Sachs in the Introduction to The Pedagogical Imagination: The Republican Legacy in 21st Century French Literature and Film (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 201 4) gives a useful sense of Bourdieu’s influence on post-1960s thought on education; see also Gilbert D. Chaitin, ‘Education and Political Identity: The Universalist Controversy’, in Ralph Albanese and M. Martin Guiney (eds), French Education: Fifty Years Later, special issue of Yale French Studies (113, July 2008), 77-93; and Clémence Cardon-Quint, ‘Enseignement du français à l’épreuve de la démocratisation (1959-2001), in Alan R. Sadovnik and Susan F. Semel (eds), Education and Inequality: Historical and Sociological Approaches to Schooling and Social Stratification, a special issue of Paedagogica historica 46:1-2 (February—April 2010), 133-48. Cardon-Quint places Bourdieu’s work in the context of anxieties (and guilt) about the failure of schools to correct social inequality, and also emphasizes the influence of Renée Balibar, Les Francais fictifs: le rapport des styles littéraires au français national (Paris: Hachette, 1974). In their engaging introduction to French Education, Albanese and Guiney write about the teaching

The work of Edward Said is a particularly important example for this book. His memoir, Out of Place, reflecting back on almost his whole life and career, is one of several works to reveal internal tensions around education. In the Preface Said remarks: The basic split in my life was the one between Arabic, my native language, and English, the language of my education and subsequent expression as a scholar and teacher’ (xv). Schools, he continues, had a powerful hold on him when he was young, and ‘their hold persists’ (xvi). For the most part, Said’s portrait of his childhood education, which was spread across schools in Jerusalem, Cairo, Lebanon and the United States, is bitterly negative. Looking back on his time at Gezira Preparatory School (GPS), he recalls: ‘Very little of what surrounded me at the school — lessons, teachers, students, atmosphere — was sustaining or helpful to me’ (45). He was force-fed material that was alien and nationalistic: ‘Our lessons and books were mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred, and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us that they deserved’ (39). ‘GPS gave me my first experience of an organized system set up as a colonial business by the British’, he explains: ‘The atmosphere was one of unquestioning assent framed with hateful servility by teachers and students alike. The school was not interesting as a place of learning but it gave me my first extended contact with colonial authority’ (42).

Things initially seemed better when he moved to the Cairo School for American Children, but he was quickly disillusioned, inserted into a classroom ‘ruled by the first great martinet and sadist of my life, a Miss Clark, whose single-minded persecution of me crippled my already uncertain sense of self” (83). Next was a stint at St Georges School, Jerusalem, where he felt more at home but where the lessons, except in maths, ‘made no mark’: ‘it combined indifferent teaching, a volatile atmosphere, and, as I look back on it fifty years later, a general sense of purposeless routine trying to maintain itself as the country’s identity was undergoing irrevocable change’ (109). And it was more of the same at Victoria College, Cairo, the would-be ‘Eton of the Middle East’ (180), which he entered in the autumn of 1949, aged 13. Again the curriculum — indeed, the whole ethos — was apparently designed to serve and to glorify a moribund colonialism. The students, he writes, ‘were seen as paying of French in France: ‘this particular discipline has been suffering from a chronic, perhaps endemic state of “crisis” ever since education gradually came under the purview of the state (a process that was essentially complete by 1880)’ (5).

members of some putative colonial elite that was being schooled in the ways of a British imperialism that had already expired, though we did not fully know it’ (185-86). Said again brings individual teachers briefly into focus, but very rarely in a positive light: chemistry classes were given by ‘a semimoronic middle-aged man whose name I have forgotten’ (191); his English teacher, whose name he does remember, and mentions, was ‘blustering, weak, and incompetent’ (206); and more generally the teachers, mostly ‘cruel, impersonal, and authoritarian Englishmen’, were ‘variously comic and/or maimed’ (183). It is no wonder that the young Edward, who was embarrassed by his ill-fitting, aspirational English name, felt out of place and uninspired. What is more, although the memoir reserves special opprobrium for the ‘hated British’ (198) and even for one teacher’s ‘bad British teeth and ungenerous lips’ (38), things scarcely improved when he moved on to higher levels of education in the US. ‘Although it was in the traditional picture-book sense a beautiful, leafy, hilly, and perfectly maintained New England site, he writes of Mount Hermon School, Massachusetts, ‘I found it altogether alienating and desolate’. The main building, he adds, ‘could have been a factory’ (225-26). In due course Princeton and Harvard also proved parochial and lacklustre. True, along the way he had some uplifting encounters with particular books and teachers, but those positive memories are limited. In Out of Place as a whole his acrimony with regard to his formative experiences of education is overwhelming.

On one level, at least hypothetically, this might seem surprising. After all, Said certainly ended up ‘well educated’ by standards that are quite widely accepted by people such as himself; his schools drew him into intellectual worlds in which he prospered; and education became his vocation, leading to an exceptionally successful and rewarding career as a literary critic, intellectual and university teacher. On another level, nonetheless, Said’s combination of causticity and disengagement is exactly what today’s ‘postcolonial’ reader might expect. The historical circumstances in which Edward Said was educated seem in many respects to belong to a vanished world, and much of what endures appears discreditable. Consequently it is unsurprising if his memories of colonial education are painful, if his early encounters with colonial mentalities, especially in their cultural and educational manifestations, had at least as much influence on him as any of the formal teaching he received, and if he found his lessons dull, alienating and doctrinaire.

All of this affected not only his ‘sense of self”, of course, but also his critical work — and from there, at least a couple of generations of students, writers and readers. His books Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) have been among the most important of the last 40 years for academic literary criticism and were instrumental in launching postcolonial studies as a field. When Orientalism appeared, Said positioned it against ‘an implicit consensus [...] building up for the past decade in which the study of literature is considered to be profoundly, even constitutively nonpolitical’, and he lamented literary critics’ tendency to apply their techniques only to strictly literary objects.® Orientalism helped shatter any such consensus. Said encouraged critics to look sceptically at educational tradition, especially because of its entanglement with colonialism and nationalism, and to treat with suspicion canonical literary texts and conventional methods of teaching them. Although his own tastes remained famously and controversially high-cultural, he encouraged attention to non-literary texts such as works of colonial-era philology and geography, and to literary authors from beyond Europe and outside the canon. Today, a considerable proportion of academic critics in ‘English’ departments investigate the ideological currents coursing through literary texts or work on objects outside the traditional bounds of literature. And critics of colonial education, or critics of colonialism whose attention is occasionally caught by colonial education — a good number of them still also teachers of literature — tend to follow Said in emphasizing not only that schools worked in complicity with colonialism and were violently hostile to the cultures and mother tongues of colonial pupils but also that some of the blinkered and damaging attitudes that shaped colonial education have persisted into the present.

One way of describing Our Civilizing Mission is as an attempt to cast light on some current critical anxieties about the historical and conceptual foundations of ‘humanities’ education, especially when it comes to teaching literature. My book’s title is meant to evoke anxieties of that order, not to imply that ‘we’ have simply inherited pedagogical frameworks from colonialism, still less that we should embrace any such inheritance; and who ‘we’ might be in all this is one of the issues I want to raise in readers’ minds. As I have already suggested, few of us

8 Edward W. Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community’ [1982], in Reflections on Exile, and other Literary and Cultural Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 118—47: 132. References will be given in the text to Orientalism ([1978] London: Penguin, 2003), and Culture and Imperialism ([1993] London: Vintage, 1994).

who work in education today would describe our work as ‘civilizing’ our students, or believe that British, French or European culture is synonymous with ‘civilization’; and very few of us believe our work is a ‘mission’ (though we may still think it is a vocation) or wish to be associated with colonialism. At the same time, many of us are aware that our work has been influenced by a particular history in which European nationalism and colonialism have played a substantial role; we are aware that there are troubling continuities, as well as differences, between our work and that of teachers in the past, in schools and universities; and, whether or not we have any particular interest in colonialism, we may have quite fundamental doubts about what we might consider the ‘colonial’ impulse of humanities education, by which I mean its tendency to inculcate specific values and norms. To a significant extent that normative tendency may be inevitable; and, if that is the case, we need to decide if we can still justify it, whatever our special areas of interest. So while the book is in some senses grounded in postcolonial studies, I am also working on the assumption that for many twenty-first-century readers in a wider sphere, something like my epigraph from Halbwachs — where he asserts that education allows society to fashion children in its own image, and, taking them away from their parents, installs within them a ‘veritable duality’ — may have taken on an air of ‘coloniality’. I see the project, then, in the context of broader misgivings which, as Steiner’s essay made clear, predate postcolonial studies and go beyond it; and I hope that readers will make their own connections between, on the one hand, the quite specific and unambiguously colonial material that is my primary focus and, on the other hand, other educational histories and representations, and their own experiences of education.