Arts of the Contact Zone
When first reading Mary Louise Pratt's essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," one may feel overwhelmed by the level of writing and philosophy it is composed of. She uses terms and phrases such as autoethnography, imagined community, and safe house in this work to help demonstrate the reasoning of her thoughts and feelings about historical and actual events she speaks about. In her essay Mary Louise Pratt talks about "transculturation" and "ethnography." She speaks about imaginary spaces where differences and inequalities are sensed, and even recognized. These imaginary spaces are called the contact zones, and many people encounter the contact zones to teach, learn or even contradict the ideas and theories that are under scrutiny and objection today. In the first few paragraphs of this essay, the reader is introduced to a term coined and repeated by Pratt throughout the piece, "contact zones." She uses 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 are lived out in many parts of the world today" (Pratt 584). A contact zone can be positive, for example a clas
sroom where students are from different backgrounds. This gives people a way to talk and discuss certain aspects of history. It provides an opportunity for identifying with the ideas, interests and even history of others. This requires correspondence and interaction between people. On the other hand, a contact zone can be negative, such as colonialism. A country taking over another native community is oppression, rather than an exchange of ideas. This is what the Andeans, specifically Guaman Poma, tried to explain to their conquerors, the Spanish. Both of these situations will be discussed later in this essay. Pratt's essay opens in speaking about her son's admiration for collecting and trading baseball cards. She emphasizes how her son's entertaining and simple hobby gave him the opportunity to learn so many of life's lessons. For example, trading the cards gave him a sense of fairness and trust. He learned about exchange and arithmetic, and patterns and order by arranging the cards. Towards the end of the essay, Pratt speaks of a course at Stanford University on different cultures, ideas and values. This class attracted many different students from varying backgrounds. Every student, no one was excluded, saw how the world described their cultures, ideas and views. The students experienced pain, rage and disbelief, but at the same time, they were able to experience the joys of the contact zone: wonder, revelation, mutual understanding and new wisdom. Here, Pratt also introduces the idea of a safe house. A safe house can be described as a therapeutic group or social space where one's feelings are validated, rather than being challenged. A safe house is opposite of a contact zone, because a contact zone can be an uncomfortable situation at times. From this can also stem the idea of an imagined community. This idea is based upon common and assumed s
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1274
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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