Table Of ContentOur Civilizing Mission
The Lessons of Colonial Education
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 60
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
Series Editor
CHARLES FORSDICK
University of Liverpool
Editorial Board
TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS
Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College
MIREILLE ROSELLO DEREK SCHILLING
University of Amsterdam Johns Hopkins University
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem-
porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical
practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural
and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All
manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression
are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes
in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary
culture.
Recent titles in the series:
46 Oana Panaïté, The Colonial Fortune in 53 Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod
Contemporary Fiction in French Locating Guyane
47 Jason Herbeck, Architextual 54 Adrian May, From Bataille to Badiou:
Authenticity: Constructing Literature Lignes, the preservation of Radical
and Literary Identity in the French French Thought, 1987–2017
Caribbean
55 Charlotte Hammond, Entangled
48 Yasser Elhariry, Pacifist Invasions: Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications
Arabic, Translation & the in the Francophone Caribbean
Postfrancophone Lyric
56 Julia Waters, The Mauritian
49 Colin Davis, Traces of War: Novel: Fictions of Belonging
Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in
57 Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters:
Twentieth-Century French Writing
Women’s reading and the literary
50 Alison J. Murray Levine, Vivre Ici: canon in France since the
Space, Place and Experience in Belle Époque
Contemporary French Documentary
58 John Patrick Walsh, Migration and
51 Louise Hardwick, Joseph Zobel: Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian
Négritude and the Novel Literature, 1982–2017
52 Jennifer Solheim, The Performance 59 Ari J. Blatt and Edward J. Welch,
of Listening in Postcolonial France in Flux: Space, Territory,
Francophone Culture and Contemporary Culture
NICHOLAS HARRISON
Our Civilizing Mission
The Lessons of Colonial Education
Our Civilizing Mission
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2019 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2019 Nicholas Harrison
The right of Nicholas Harrison to be identified as the author of this book
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-78694-176-3 cased
epdf ISBN 978-1-78694-968-4
Typeset in Sabon by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Note on translations and citations xiii
Introduction: Our Civilizing Mission 1
1 Lessons from Said 15
2 ‘Nos ancêtres les colons’ 37
3 Teaching in a Time of Crisis 85
4 Unfamiliar Worlds 161
5 French Lessons 220
Conclusion: Education’s Impact 285
Bibliography 319
Index 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
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’]éducation est le moyen le plus efficace dont dispose une
société pour former ses membres à son image. Certes, la famille
prend d’abord l’enfant 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
Émile Durkheim L’Évolution pédagogique en France
(1st edition 1938; 2nd edition 1969)2
2 Halbwachs, Introduction to Émile Durkheim, L’Évolution 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
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
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, Siobhàn McIlvanney, 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
Stathis Kouvelakis, Stephanie Mannion, Francesco Manzini, Ros
Murray, Soizick Solman and Jim Wolfreys.
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, Françoise 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 encour-
agement, 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 Bibliothèque universitaire Ramon
