This is a deeply insightful, stimulating and scholarly book — uncompromisingly reflective, finely argued and carefully referenced, it deepens our understanding of colonial education and legacies in a number of mutually enriching ways that consistently draw out complexity and urge us to think about the teaching of literature. This is a book that will last the test of years and will prompt better scholarship (and, possibly, classroom practice) from the rest of us.
Patrick Crowley, University College Cork
30 May 2019
Prof. Nicholas Harrison publishes new book on colonial education
'Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education' was published on 30 May 2019.
Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education, the latest work from Nicholas Harrison (Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies with the King's Department of French) was published today by Liverpool University Press.
The book is "at once an exploration of colonial education and a response to current anxieties about the historical and conceptual foundations of the ‘humanities’."
It treats colonial education as a facet of colonialism, drawing on the work of ‘colonized’ writers which attests to the suffering inflicted by colonialism, to the shortcomings of colonial education, and to the often painful mismatch between the world of the colonial school and students’ home cultures. It also asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education, and its powers of transformation.
(Aug 2022 - The Department of French is now the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures)
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Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies