The Other Victorians: What If Jane Eyre was a Missionary? (Clarendon Lecture 3 by Professor Simon Gikandi)

Professor Simon Gikandi, Princeton, will give the Clarendon Lectures at 5:30 pm on the 28 October, 30 October, 4 November and 6 November on the topic of 'English from Below: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline'. All are welcome; no booking is required.

Abstract:

The subject of these lectures is the appropriation and transformation of English by the colonized as they sought to enter spaces of linguistic and imaginative prohibition in the twentieth century. A central argument in the lectures is that while the English language was a core instrument of colonial governmentality, the English literary text was a key arsenal in the project of decolonization. Why and how did English, a discipline that was closely associated with English ethnicity, become central to a decolonial aesthetic? And why did anti-colonial intellectuals assume that English was the discipline most capable of responding to the crisis of late colonialism and the desire for new horizons of experience? Drawing from examples and debates in the African and Caribbean archive, the lectures will track the rise and fall of English in the colonial world  and the role of canonical English texts—John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, the Plays of William Shakespeare, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre—in the making, writing, and thinking of anti-colonial intellectuals. In its travels to the ends of empire, the English text found itself, to use Edward Said’s memorable terms, “transformed by new uses, its new position in a new time and place.” 

The third lecture is on: 'The Other Victorians: What If Jane Eyre was a Missionary?' on 4 November 2025 at 5.30pm in Examination Schools, Oxford. No booking required; seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

All lectures in the series:

Lecture 1 (28 October 2025): English in the (post) Colonial Archive
Lecture 2 (30 October 2025): Translating English: On Shakespeare and Bunyan in Africa
Lecture 3 (4 November 2025): The Other Victorians: What If Jane Eyre was a Missionary?
Lecture 4 (6 November 2025): Decolonizing English: An Incomplete Project

Simon Gikandi is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Princeton University. He is a scholar of the literatures and cultures of Africa and its diasporas in Europe and the Americas. He was editor of PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Language Association (MLA) from 2011 to 2016 and President of the Association in 2019-2020. His many books include Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication. His book Slavery and the Culture of Taste was winner of both the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award and of the African Studies Association Melville J. Herskovits Award. He is the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature, coeditor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, and editor of The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, volume 11 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. His latest book, African Literature in the World, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Gikandi is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the  British Academy.