In a 1991 keynote address to the
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...
titled "Arts of the Contact Zone",
Mary Louise Pratt Mary Louise Pratt (born 1948) is a Silver Professor and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 1970, her M.A. ...
introduced the concept of "the contact zone." She articulated, "I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today".
Pratt described a site for linguistic and cultural encounters, wherein power is negotiated and struggle occurs. Although when introduced this term was in the context of literacy and literary theories, the term has been appropriated to conversations across the humanities and has been used in the context of feminist theory,
critical race theory
Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. Goa ...
, postcolonial theory and in discussions of teaching and pedagogy. The contact zone is similar to other concepts that address relationality and contiguity such as positionality,
standpoint theory
Standpoint theory, or standpoint epistemology, is a theory for analyzing inter-subjective discourses. Standpoint theory proposes that authority is rooted in individuals' personal knowledge and perspectives and the power that such authority exer ...
, perspectivism,
intersectionality
Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of adva ...
, and relationality.
"Arts of the Contact Zone"
In "Arts of the Contact Zone",
Pratt describes a manuscript from 1613 penned by Andean man named
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (ca. 1535Fane, 165 – after 1616), also known as Huamán Poma or Wamán Poma, was a Quechua nobleman known for chronicling and denouncing the ill treatment of the natives of the Andes by the Spanish after their ...
. The manuscript was a letter written to King Phillip III of Spain and was titled ''The First New Chronicle and Good Government''. The manuscript details Spanish conquest in South America. Pratt cites the manuscript as an example of autoethnography. She writes, "Guaman Poma's ''New Chronicle'' is an instance of what I have proposed to call an ''autoethnographic'' text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them" (35).
The ''New Chronicle'' ends with a revisionist account of the Spanish conquest. Pratt uses the manuscript as an example of an oppressed person or group resisting hegemony, and she connects the practice of autoethnography, critique and resistance to the creation of contact zones.
Transculturation
Pratt also shares the example of
Poma's ''New Chronicle'' to give an example of "
transculturation
Transculturation is a term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 (from the article Our America by José Martí) to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. Transculturation encompasses more than transition from ...
" or a term that ethnographers have used "to describe the process whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant metropolitan culture".
Additionally, Pratt gives the origin of the term "
transculturation
Transculturation is a term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 (from the article Our America by José Martí) to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. Transculturation encompasses more than transition from ...
," writing, "The term, originally coined by Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940, aimed to replace concepts of acculturation and assimilation used to characterize culture under conquest" (36).
Pratt confirms "Transculturation, like autoethnography, is a phenomenon of the contact zone".
Purpose of the Contact Zone
Pratt states that one of the purposes of the contact zone is "intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication and culture that gets done in the academy".
Pratt takes issue with the notion of communities as "imagined entities"
and that this line of thinking creates a type of problematic nationalism.
Other uses
The contact zone has been used outside of its original spatial concept to describe connections between identity groups that are interacting outside of a specific, local, physical space.
The notion of the contact zone has been used to facilitate discussions within composition studies on the topics of multiculturalism, multilingualism and
critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
It insists that issues of social justice and de ...
. The contact zone is used by scholars as a trope for visualizing solutions to conflicts. Marilyn Edelstein discussed the contact zone and multiculturalism. In Edelstein's article, "Multiculturalisms, Past and Present, and Future"
questions of inclusion versus difference are prominent. In "Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone,”
Min-Zhan Lu discussed multilingualism and the contact zone, where the student text is the site of struggle.
Pratt
Pratt is an English surname. Notable people with the surname include:
A–F
* Abner Pratt (1801–1863), American diplomat, jurist, politician, lawyer
* Al Pratt (baseball) (1847–1937), American baseball player
* Andy Pratt (baseball) (bor ...
also uses the contact zone to discuss the classroom space. Pratt writes, "All the students in the class had the experience... of having their cultures discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them; all the students experienced face-to-face the ignorance and incomprehension, and occasionally the hostility of others ... Along with rage, incomprehension, and pain, there were exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom—the joys of the contact zone".
Patricia Bizzell
Patricia Bizzell, Ph.D. is a Professor of English, emerita, and former Chairperson of the English Department at College of the Holy Cross, United States, where she taught from 1978 to 2019. She founded and directed the Writer's Workshop, a peer tu ...
went so far as to suggest that English studies be organized around "contact zones" rather than historical periods.
Bizzell proposed, "I am suggesting that we organize English studies not in terms of literary or chronological periods, nor essentialized racial or gender categories, but rather in terms of historically defined contact zones, moments when different groups within the society contend for the power to interpret what is going on" (167).
Bizzell uses the term to refer to moments in space and time, rather than abstract spaces in the mind or in literature. She describes contact zones as "circumscribed in time and space, but with elastic boundaries".
James Clifford applies the notion of contact zone to the museum studies in his book "Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century" (1997).
Drawing on the ethnographic research among museum curators, anthropologists, experts on
Northwest Coast art
Northwest Coast art is the term commonly applied to a style of art created primarily by artists from Tlingit, Haida, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and other First Nations and Native American tribes of the Northwest ...
, and a group of Tlingit elders in the basement of the
Portland Museum of Art
The Portland Museum of Art, or PMA, is the largest and oldest public art institution in the U.S. state of Maine. Founded as the Portland Society of Art in 1882. It is located in the downtown area known as The Arts District in Portland, Maine.
...
(Oregon) in 1989, Clifford shows that the museum is more than just a place of consultation or research. He states, "When museums are seen as contact zones, their organising structure as a ''collection'' becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral ''relationship'' -- a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull.
..A centre and a periphery are assumed: the centre point of gathering, the periphery an area of discovery. The museum, usually located in a metropolitan cit, is the historical destination for the cultural productions it lovingly and authoritatively salvages, care for, and interprets".
Some scholars, however, question such an approach. For example, Robin Boast returns to original meaning of contact zone developed by Pratt
and writes about the neo-colonial context of contact zone. He states, "on one hand, I welcome the new collaboration, and, on the other, I raise a serious concern that the neocolonial nature of these contact zones could destroy the very empowerment that it is meant to engender."
In his article Boast draws attention to the important but rather underappreciated part of contact zone,
authoethnography. He concludes that the autoethnography is a "fundamental neocolonial rhetorical genre and even instrument of appropriation".
See also
*
Cross-cultural communication
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communic ...
*
Interculturalism
Interculturalism is a political movement that supports cross-cultural dialogue and challenging self-segregation tendencies within cultures.John Nagle, Multiculturalism's Double-Bind: Creating Inclusivity Cosmopolitanism and Difference. Ashgate Pub ...
*
Translanguaging
Translanguaging can refer to a pedagogical process of utilizing more than one language within a classroom lesson or it can be used to describe the way bilinguals use their linguistic resources to make sense of and interact with the world around th ...
*
First contact (anthropology)
In anthropology, first contact is the first meeting of two communities previously without contact with one another. Notable examples of first contact are those between the Spanish Empire and the Arawak in 1492; and the Aboriginal Australians with ...
*
Urban vitality
Urban vitality is the quality of those spaces in cities that are capable of attracting heterogeneous people for different types of activities throughout varied time schedules. The areas of the city with high vitality are perceived as alive, live ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Contact Zone, The
Language contact
Writing