In “Arts of the Contact Zone” Mary Louise Pratt begins her essay by talking about all her son has learned from baseball card collecting. She goes from the most obvious things like the pronounciation of the players' names to more subtle teachings like “the meaning of comodified labor” (Pratt 1). After this discussion she makes the seemingly unrelated jump to the enormous letter “The First New Cronicle and Good Government” which was written by an Andean man named Felipe Guamen Poma de Ayala. The letter, written to Phillip III, was an extensive bilingual piece of literature which took aspects of Spanish history, beliefs and culture and integrated the Andean's within. Pratt uses the example of Guamen's piece to explain her beliefs on things she calls contact zones about which she says “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with eachother” (Pratt 2). In order to describe Guamens text Pratt explians “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” (Pratt 3). By this description and her statements following I take this to mean that she regards Guamans piece as reactionary and in response to cultural differences. Guaman uses the contact zone to write his piece. Pratt also goes back to her son and uses the example of one of his class assignments to illustrate that reactionary aspect. In the case of her son he got the gold star of acceptance without his piece truly being acknowlaged as “...the attempt to be critical or contestatory, to paradoy the structures of autohority” (Pratt 7). Pratt also brings up anoter text, similar to Guamen's but with ideas that were more acceptable and accessable. This shows that things written in the contact zone are diverse and vary in acceptance by the other culture(s) involved.
Pratt moves from Guaman's piece to the subject of a type of classroom, one that existed within the contact zone. The pieces read in the class were reacted to in a number of various ways and the class was described by Pratt when she stated “No one was excluded, and no one was safe” (Pratt 7).
Posted by victoria on December 8, 2008
Tags Uncategorized
Comments on specific paragraphs:
Click the
icon to the right of a paragraph
Comments on the page as a whole:
Click the
icon to the right of the page title (works the same as paragraphs)