Academic Exchange Quarterly Fall 2003 ISSN 1096-1453 Volume 7, Issue 3
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Literature and
International Relations:
The Challenges of Interdisciplinarity
Linda Racioppi,
Linda Racioppi
is Professor of International Relations at
Colleen Tremonte,
Colleen Tremonte is Associate
Professor of Humanities, Culture and Writing at
Abstract:
As
many scholars of literature and international relations have suggested,
literature, religion, art, music and other forms of cultural representation
have been central to colonialism and imperialism, war and conflict, national
liberation, and globalization. But international relations courses, as
reflected in curricula, syllabi and textbooks, have been slow to incorporate
the study of literature and literary representation. We designed a course on literature, culture, and
post-colonial politics to fill a gap in our institution’s public affairs
curriculum. In this article, we describe how we constructed the
course and we articulate some of the questions that emerged concerning
pedagogical content knowledge in an interdisciplinary context.
Literature and International Relations: The Challenges
of Interdisciplinarity
As
Julie Thompson Klein demonstrates in her important work, Interdisciplinarity:
History, Theory, and Practice, the concept of interdisciplinarity
enjoys a long if complicated history, with some scholars tracing the concept
back to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and others locating it in the
ideas of twentieth-century "educational reforms, applied research, and
movement across disciplinary boundaries" (1990: 19). Yet no
matter where we locate the 'source' of interdisciplinarity,
the reconceiving of knowledge bases and
epistemologies in the mid- to late-twentieth century heightened our awareness
of the appropriateness, if not necessity, of such inquiry. In particular, the recognition of the
over-rigidity of disciplinary boundaries and the limitations of approaching
problems from a single, disciplinary frame resulted in the emergence of a number
of new or newly reconfigured fields or areas of study.[1] Not surprisingly, systematic attention to
this 'inter' -approach to study has been qualified, with certain disciplines
being much more open to integrating select perspectives than others. International relations is one field that has
long embraced political science, history, and economics as crucial disciplinary
perspectives to bring to bear on its examinations and study. And the field has increasingly acknowledged
the central role of culture to the formation and re-formation of international
politics and power relations.[2] As the
works of writers as diverse as Edward Said (1978, 1993), Arjun
Appadurai (1996), and Samuel Huntington (1993) have
suggested, culture and cultural representation (literature, religion, art,
music, etc.) have been central to colonialism and imperialism, war and
conflict, and globalization. Nonetheless,
international relations courses, as reflected in curricula, syllabi and
textbooks, have been slow to incorporate the study of cultural factors such as
literature and literary representation.[3]
Instructors
who seek to incorporate literature into the international relations curriculum
must resolve the dilemma, common to all interdisciplinary endeavors, of
generating new knowledge and pedagogical approaches. As Klein puts it, the challenge is how to
move beyond “transmitting fields of
knowledge and linking existing disciplinary categories" to an
"integrative transmutation that emphasize[s] the individual's learning
process and the development of new conceptual approaches, new pedagogy . . .
." (1990: 27). Our experience in constructing and teaching a course that
combines literature and international politics demonstrates the difficulty and
promise of developing such a new conceptual approach. In this article, we discuss the context and
content of the course, and we try to articulate some of the challenges in
developing a body of teaching knowledge specifically relevant to this
interdisciplinary endeavor.
Context
Several
years ago we confronted these issues as we designed an upper-division
course to demonstrate the connections between the study of literature and
culture to the study of international politics.
The institutional setting,
In
the “Post-Colonial Imagination,” we sought to overcome this problem by
combining the study of historical-political and literary texts as equally
important means to understand the interrelationships of different forms of
power. The literary critic Bart Moore-Gilbert captures the dilemma for such an
approach when he asks, “To what extent can literary texts be used as source
material by historians? To what extent is it possible to combine a
socio-historical and ideological reading with aesthetic criticism of literary
texts?” (1996: 12) Implicitly, Moore-Gilbert’s questions suggest two
pedagogical tasks: the need to structure
the course not only to provide historical-political context for cultural texts
but to stress that politics and culture are interactive processes; and the need
to work through materials using strategies
that lead us towards integrative, synthetic ways of knowing.
Building
on the work of Edward Said and other scholars of colonialism and
post-colonialism, we sought to explore the ways in which literature and other
cultural texts provided an essential means for understanding the struggle for
national liberation as well as collective identity construction in
international politics in the late twentieth century. We wanted to ensure that
students would wrestle with the political significance of literature in the
colonial and post-colonial experiences.
As Said writes,
[In the]
struggle to achieve decolonization and independence from European control,
literature has played a crucial role in the re-establishment of a national
cultural heritage, in the re-instatement of native idioms, in the re-imagining
and re-figuring of local histories, geographies, communities.... literature not
only mobilized active resistance to incursions from the outside but also
contributed massively as the shaper, creator, agent of illumination within the
realm of the colonized. (1992)
Said argues for the power of
literature as shaper of international relations, and as such, literature needs
to be seen as profoundly political.[4]
But how could we, as instructors trying to blend literature, history and
politics into one interdisciplinary course, operationalize
Said’s insights and respond to Moore-Gilbert’s
concerns? What teaching knowledge would
we need? What texts, course structure
and pedagogical strategies would lead us to synthetic ways of knowing?
Grappling with Content and
Pedagogy
In
designing the course, we tried to anticipate the major difficulties
international relations students would have, and amongst these, we believed the
most immediate problem would be how to read literature
and see it as relevant to the study of international politics. To address this issue, we made novels central
to the course content,[5] and we drew heavily from theories in the field of
post-colonial literary studies, an area in which we believed few students would
have significant background.
Understandably, students had little familiarity with the range of
different perspectives and theoretical approaches to post-colonialism much less
an ability to see how such perspectives have political content and are
contextual (politically). The readings
we selected were intended to help students theorize the ways in which
literature could promote colonial relations as well as resist colonial control. The concept of representation is central to
much of this literature. Of course for
literary theorists, representation is not simply ‘standing in for something
else’ (as in electoral representation, which international relations well
understand). It can also be more than
accuracy or replication of ‘fact’. It
can be dynamic, political and constitutive of ‘reality’. From this perspective, it is impossible to
get international relations students to take literature seriously and to
appreciate its political impact if they cannot accept this wider view of
representation.[6]
In its first iteration, we
organized the course to allow students to work in collaborative groups in which
they explored (and sometimes floundered over) competing theoretical
perspectives, trying to articulate and critique differing views of power and
agency. We structured both formal
assignments and informal class work to force students to move continuously
between theory and literature and to develop comparative strategies for analyzing
the novels. For example, the first novel
students read was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We started with this work because it is
familiar to many college students and because it holds an enduring place in the
“canon.” We asked students to identify
the basic narrative structure (e.g., themes, point of view, plot
structure) as well as to situate the novel in its historical context (e.g., the
timeframe of the narrative, the moment of the novel’s production, and the
subsequent reception of the novel).
Students read critiques by Chinua Achebe, Patrick Brantlinger and
Said. We also asked students to examine Heart of Darkness through the lens of
our previous discussions of representation and of post-colonial theorists such
as Abdul JanMohamed and Gayatri
Spivak whose work does not directly address Conrad’s
novel. We hoped that if we succeeded with the novels, students would be able to
apply what they learned to other types of cultural texts (e.g., film, short
stories). Each of the major out-of-class
assignments asked students to do increasingly more complex work: groups
researched and presented information that situated each literary or filmic text
that we studied; students engaged in email dialogues that attempted to link
diverse class readings by generating questions for in-class discussion; they
completed a comparative analytic essay in which they applied theory to the
novels or films; and they undertook major research projects that critiqued
cultural artefacts in light of the theoretical
readings.
Over time, the course has
been modified by instructors, adding new theoretical and disciplinary
perspectives, focusing on different regions of the world, incorporating film,
travel literature and poetry, and trying different assignments and class
formats. The course in its different
iterations has been successful: students
have been able to engage the theoretical literature, to do comparative
analysis, to employ varying perspectives, and to explore literature and film as
politically significant. Instructors,
however, continue to grapple with the issue of how to integrate different
disciplinary approaches and how to build knowledge about post-colonialism and
about teaching in this interdisciplinary context.
The Challenge of
Interdisciplinary Knowledge Production
We came to realize that interdisciplinary
knowledge production was an important dimension of the course. Such knowledge production involved both
students and teachers. A crucial part of
the process for students required that they develop a mastery of frames and
that they apply and manipulate them.
This in itself is a great accomplishment. But an interdisciplinary course on post-coloniality asks students to do more: it asks them to integrate different
disciplinary frames and to see their inter-disciplinary explorations as part of
producing new ways of understanding post-colonialism. This, in turn, presses teachers to acquire new frames and strategies
for teaching. That is, teachers
cannot rely exclusively on their disciplinary background and their experience
in teaching within that discipline: they must help to construct a new teaching
knowledge base, or, as Lee Shulman notes, a new pedagogical content knowledge. Such knowledge is “the blending of content
and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues
are organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities
of learners, and presented for instruction” (1987: 8).
Developing pedagogical
content knowledge demands that teachers be “able to comprehend subject matter…
to elucidate subject matter in new ways, reorganize and partition it, clothe it
in activities and emotions, and metaphors and exercises, and in examples and
demonstrations, so that it can be grasped by students” (1987: 13). Yet because different disciplines have varying
positions on what constitutes knowledge and because they can promote competing
modes of inquiry, the process of teaching interdisciplinary subject matter can
be difficult. Traditionally, there have been two approaches to designing
interdisciplinary courses. The “bridge-building” approach consciously retains
distinct disciplinary methodologies (thus minimizing the need to overcome
competing modes) whereas the “restructuring” approach contests disciplinary
frames and aims to build new, cohesive modes of inquiry (Klein 1990). A “restructuring” approach forces
instructors to confront new, multifaceted content knowledge. Neither of these approaches, however,
guarantees the production of new pedagogical content knowledge. We came to realize that a course that tried
to blend literature, culture and politics, needed pedagogical content knowledge
that reflects the specific character of this interdisciplinary enterprise.
Instructors turning to the
literature on colonialism and post-colonialism to provide suggestions would
instead find a scholarship that is diverse but largely discipline-based. For example, despite a range of theoretical
and methodological perspectives, many of the major readers that are used in
post-colonial studies courses are largely comprised of excerpts of critical
readings of literature.[7] Such sources
are useful in getting students to master the content of the novels, major
themes, and different theoretical takes on post-colonialism. However, these sources, while important,
often treat these areas as related but separate bodies of knowledge,
obfuscating the possibilities of interdisciplinary inquiry. Teaching that aims to integrate literary
studies and international relations calls for more scholarship that illuminates interdisciplinary habits of mind
and makes interdisciplinary pedagogical content knowledge transparent to
instructors.
Our own experience in
teaching “The Post-Colonial Imagination” suggests that three considerations are
key to producing such knowledge and such scholarship. Faculty must recognize the ways in which
their own disciplinary training structures their thinking about
post-colonialism, literature and international politics and profoundly shapes
their teaching. Faculty involved in
interdisciplinary teaching projects should have a desire to understand other
disciplinary perspectives and epistemologies.
For example, a political scientist teaching in this course should be
open to learning about the various critical approaches in literary
studies. It is often through
conversations with a colleague from a different background that we broaden our
own research and teaching agendas. While we thought we had the same
understanding of Said’s point that literature is
important to the making of global politics, we soon recognized that how we saw
its importance was rooted in our disciplinary backgrounds: was literature a means used by nationalist
intellectuals to serve a political end; was literature primarily an artistic
expression which could represent a nationalist political story; or did
literature participate in the construction of national identity and colonial
power relations? Team-teaching can be
invaluable not only in helping faculty make visible to themselves their own
disciplinary biases towards research, teaching and learning, but also in
helping them build new expertise. Through designing and team- teaching this
course, our understandings of the relationships between literature and
international relations were transformed.
Second, in teaching the
course we realized that faculty must be committed to creating a learning
environment that fosters interdisciplinary habits of mind. Collaborative pedagogy seems particularly
well suited to this task. Because it encourages students to recognize and build
from their prior knowledge and to confront the boundaries imposed by their
previous training, it allows students to support one another in navigating a
new subject matter while simultaneously learning how to engage in
interdisciplinary analysis. For example,
English literature majors can help international relations majors to appreciate
narrative structure and rhetorical strategies, while international relations
majors may help clarify theories of imperialism and colonialism. At the same time, they are working together
to acquire new conceptual tools. To
facilitate their work, our own approach to collaboration involves structured
interventions. Because we act as participant-observers in this process, we are
better able to see the leaps and gaps in student learning and adapt our
teaching to the experiences of the classroom.
Collaborative pedagogy then helps us as teachers build and articulate
pedagogical content knowledge.
Finally, just as the faculty
member creates a space for students to acknowledge their role as agents of
knowledge production, so too there must be a space within the curriculum that
values courses that integrate the study of literature and politics. Constructing such a space within the
undergraduate curriculum requires departmental and college-level cooperation in
a range of ways, from cross-disciplinary team-teaching to cross-listed
courses. To sustain an interdisciplinary
space, broader institutional support is critical in promoting an appreciation
of the type of knowledge production that interdisciplinary study fosters.
Footnotes:
[1] See Klein: 104-117. See also Moran 2002.
[2] For a discussion of international relations’ insularity from
other fields of knowledge, see Darby 1998.
Darby argues that by failing to recognize the political significance of
literature and culture, international relations limits itself and its
explanatory power.
[3] Some textbooks have addressed cultural issues
such as religion, ethnicity and nationalism, almost always because these are
seen as contributors to conflict. See Globalization of World Politics: An
Introduction to International Relations by John Baylis
and Steve Smith.
[4] For a discussion of the
debate between Said and Ernest Gellner about the role
of literature and culture in colonialism, see Winifred L. Amaturo,
“Literature and International Relations: The Question of Culture in the
Production of International Power,” Millennium,
Vol. 24, No. 1 (1995): 1-25.
[5] Novels included, for example, Chinua Achebe, Things Fall
Apart; Edna O’Brien, House of Splendid Isolation; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.
[6] Stuart Hall can be particularly useful in
helping students understand representation.
See Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices, ed by Stuart Hall.
[7] See, for example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen (eds),
The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
References:
Appadurai, Arjun (1996)
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Darby, Phillip (1998) The
Fiction of Imperialism:
Huntington, Samuel (1993) The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
Klein,
Julie Thompson (1990) Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory,
and Practice.
Moore-Gilbert,
Bart (1996) “Cultural Transfer in Kipling’s Writing.” Kipling Journal,
Vol. 70 No. 277: 11-19.
Moran,
Joe (2002) Interdisciplinarity.
Said,
Edward (1993) Culture and
Imperialism.
__________ (1992) “Figures, Configurations,
Transfigurations,” in Commonwealth to
Post-Colonial, ed. by Anna Rutherford.
___________ (1978) Orientalism.
Shulman,
Lee (1987) “Knowledge and Teaching:
Foundations of the New Reform,” Harvard
Educational Review, Vol. 57, No. 1:
1-22.