Lessons from Said

One purpose of this chapter is to place the book’s core Algerian material in a wider intellectual context, inviting readers to pursue comparisons with their own experiences of teaching/criticism, or with other histories. It extends the Introduction’s discussion of Edward Said, treating his work as paradigmatic in its equivocal relationship to literary education and humanities education more widely, a mixture of enduring commitment and deep scepticism. Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India is treated briefly as another example. The chapter explores critically Said’s promotion of the work of the ‘intellectual’ as a possible path to political legitimacy for the literature professor, then examines Orientalism’s hesitations over literary aesthetics and his uncertainties over how to place literature politically and historically. [125]

Conclusion

The Conclusion explores the sense in which the experiences of colonial students, though highly unusual in some ways, may be exemplary or instructive in relation to certain questions in and around education. Themes include: the relevance/irrelevance of notions of a national origin, as applied to a text or an idea (notably latecularism); the impact of teaching in the humanities, including its tendency to build or reinforce some sort of common culture (though not necessarily a ‘national’ culture); what that tendency implies for the design of teaching programmes; issues of ‘adaptation’, when the classroom is diverse; the curatorial function of the critic-teacher; teaching as a form of impact; education and social mobility; and what in teaching and in students may allow or encourage students to 'think for themselves', when teaching is normative, and when students are subject to the authority of the teacher. The chapter ends by returning to Edward Said and considering possible parallels, or links, between a certain idea of education and a certain idea of the literary as notional ‘spaces’ that are political in some senses but where a kind of suspension of politics may also have value. [190]

Teaching in a Time of Crisis

Against the broader backdrop of histories and debates sketched out in earlier chapters, Chapter 3 focuses in detail on the life and work of Mouloud Feraoun, touching on other important figures including Jean Amrouche and Albert Camus. Feraoun was a successful novelist who remained dedicated to his work as a teacher in a French primary school, even when his work placed his life at threat from both sides in the Algerian war of independence (during which the FLN at one point called a boycott of French schools). He finished his life working for the CSEs (Centres sociaux 裵‎catifs) established by the French authorities during the war. The chapter tries to shed light on this heroic/anti-heroic commitment to education, and how we can understand, and perhaps justify, his decision to remain part of the colonial education system in the context of a violent anti-colonial war, despite his commitment to Algerian independence. [150]

Introduction

Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education begins by casting light on some current anxieties about the historical and conceptual foundations of ‘humanities’ education, especially when it comes to teaching literature. The book’s title, it is explained, is meant to evoke those anxieties, and a certain sense of crisis, not to imply that ‘we’ have simply inherited pedagogical frameworks from colonialism, still less that we should embrace any such inheritance. Edward Said is an important reference point; his memoir, Out of Place, reveals and exemplifies internal tensions around education, and suggests that self-doubt has pushed many critic-teachers – notably in the field of postcolonial studies, though certainly not only there – towards paradoxical and self-contradictory positions, particularly in relation to education. The possible ‘coloniality’ of all humanities education is an issue here, meaning its tendency to inculcate specific values and norms. If that normative tendency is inevitable, critic-teachers today must decide if they can still justify it. [156]

French Lessons

This chapter extends Chapter 4’s examination of the impact of colonial schooling on Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, Albert Memmi and other writers. It reflects on what went on inside the classroom, and speculates on what it was, even in a colonial education, that made it fruitful, at least in some respects, for some students. It begins by considering the dynamics – inadvertent and perverse from a colonial perspective – that sometimes made French schooling positively politicizing for colonized students, notably in relation to notions of nationalism, national identity and language politics. It then focuses on writers’ accounts of studying the French language and French literature, evidently a key part of the process, educational and psychological, that brought into being their ‘francophone’ works, which duly reflect back on their colonial/literary/educational experiences. In these ways the chapter explores how some of the children subjected to colonial schooling became some of its most astute critics, as well as its greatest success stories; and how French/colonial schooling helped shape the forms and fictions of self-reinvention for which many of the writers are known. [177]

Unfamiliar Worlds

Drawing more deeply than previous chapters on literary texts, including novels by Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Memmi, Mohammed Dib and above all Assia Djebar, this chapter explores some of the experiences offered to ‘colonized’ students in colonial schools. It emphasizes the unfamiliarity of French culture to many Algerians and other colonized populations, and the tendency of French/colonial schools to discriminate against their ‘colonial’ students and to leave them with feelings of deracination and alienation. Through Djebar it examines in detail a particular example of how a French/colonial education alienated – and politicized – female students from a Muslim background. That example, I suggest, raises wider questions about the relationship between lat瞼‎(secularism, especially in education), Islam and French Republicanism, an issue that is repeatedly invoked in debates today around gender equality and the Islamic veil in French education, and is also pertinent to post-independence Algeria. [142]

‘Nos ancêtres les colons’

This chapter examines educational history in colonial Algeria, the context from which most of the writers and texts at the centre of the book emerged. It raises general questions about the role played in colonialism and its purported ‘civilizing mission’ by colonial education, which was characterized by a remarkable diversity of perspectives, policies and institutions. Examples include the prestigious Lyc裠‎Bugeaud and the teacher training college in Bouzar蠨‎, which were attended by several major writers; and m裥‎rsas (/madrasas) where Islam and Arabic were studied, which were also attended by some eminent francophone writers, and funded by the French authorities well into an era when all state-funded education was supposed to be secular. Debates included those around adaptation and assimilation associated with the mythical phrase ‘nos anc鳲‎es les Gaulois’. Overall the chapter shows that the place of education in colonialism is misunderstood if one assumes that colonial education worked simply and consistently as a tool of colonialism – even if that was a significant part of the story. [166]