Asking tough questions about the foundations and fate of the humanities is all the rage these days. But what makes Nicholas Harrison’s Our Civilizing Mission remarkable is where he goes in search of answers: colonial education. In practical terms, the book “focuses on a generation of Algerian writers, most but not all from Muslim backgrounds, who were educated under French colonialism and were intensely exposed to France’s civilizing mission” (10). Harrison explores how writers including Assia Djebar, Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Albert Memmi, and many more experienced colonial schooling and what they did with it. Along the way, the book supplies an overview of education in colonial Algeria that is very generative despite its author’s protests that it is not meant to be comprehensive. This book’s central contribution, however, which really ought to be of interest not only to scholars in the fields of colonial/postcolonial/decolonial studies but to literary scholars...
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