Literature and International Relations:  The Challenges of Interdisciplinarity
Linda Racioppi, James Madison College, Michigan State University
Colleen Tremonte, James Madison College, Michigan State University

Linda Racioppi is Professor of International Relations. She has published books 
and articles on foreign policy, arms transfers, nationalism and ethnic conflict, 
women's organizing and gender politics. racioppi@msu.edu

Colleen Tremonte is Associate Professor of Humanities, Culture and Writing.
She has published articles on writing pedagogy and theory, interdisciplinary 
approaches to literature and film, and visual rhetoric. tremonte@msu.edu

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. 

			  * * *
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, James Madison 
College, is a residential college within Michigan State University.  Its curriculum 
aims to “provide a liberal education in public affairs,” broadly understood.  
Students major in one of three fields, International Relations, Political Theory 
and Constitutional Democracy, or Social Relations, and take courses in economics, 
a foreign language, and methodology.  Beyond the first-year program, the study of 
literary and cultural texts is not a central part of the curriculum.  Some courses 
do ‘use’ literary texts to illustrate ‘the human dimension’ of a political problem:  
the enduring questions that literature seems to pose are attractive to public 
affairs analysts. However, this approach tends to treat the literary text as 
supplementary to the central purpose of the course.  

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.  Oxford:  Oxford 
	University Press 2001; The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction 
	to the Globalization Debate, edited by David Held and Anthony McGrew.  
	London:  Blackwell, 2000.
[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.  London:  Sage Publications/Open 
	University, 1997.
[7]  See, for example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen (eds), 
	The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.  London/New York:  Routledge 1995; 
	and Gregory Castle (ed), Postcolonial Discourse:  An Anthology.  
	London:  Blackwell 2001.

References:
Appadurai, Arjun  (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.  
	Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press.
Darby, Phillip (1998) The Fiction of Imperialism:  Reading Between International 
	Relations and Postcolonialism.  London:  Cassell.
Huntington, Samuel (1993) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World 
	Order.  New York:  Simon and Schuster.
Klein, Julie Thompson (1990) Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice.  
	Detroit:  Wayne State University Press.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1996) “Cultural Transfer in Kipling’s Writing.” Kipling 
	Journal, Vol. 70 No. 277:  11-19.
Moran, Joe (2002) Interdisciplinarity.  London:  Routledge.
Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism.   New York:  Knopf.
 __________ (1992) “Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations,” in 
	Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. by Anna Rutherford.  
	Sydney: Dangaroo Press: 3-17.
___________  (1978) Orientalism.  New York:  Vintage. 
Shulman, Lee (1987) “Knowledge and Teaching:  Foundations of the New Reform,” 
	Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 57, No. 1:  1-22.