Creative Thoughts

Summary #4

Contact Zones vs. Academy

            In Mary Louise Pratt’s Arts of the Contact Zone, she explores the concept of literacy through different ideas of understanding.  Pratt first brings up the idea of the Contact Zone.  This term “refers 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.”  Guaman Poma wrote an 800-page letter to King Phillip III in the year 1613.  Academics are puzzled by this because they don’t know how long ago people where able to read and write.  Most of what is found from ancient rhetoric isn’t words on a page they are art on walls.  

            Autoethnographic text (the “text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them), define the language barriers between different societies.  These barriers can be overcome by providing different kinds of literature for different “communities.”  This text can either be in word form for the literate, or in art form for the non-literate.  Both forms of text can have the same meaning, just different interpretations.  The issue that I can see with these different forms of text is what if the person looking at the art doesn’t understand the meanings of the “sword” or the “height measures?”  Then does everyone have to resort to being literate and reading to understand the Inca or really any culture?  Guaman Poma’s work is said to be the work definitely of a contact zone.  He includes the written text in his letter to King Phillip III, but also images representing what are happening throughout their culture.   

            Pratt looks further into different “communities.”  These communities are closely related to Bizzell’s discourse communities.  “The idea 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.”  To me, it seems that rather than bring this “contact zone” farther away from the academy, Pratt is identifying closely with how the academy understands different forms of written text.  Speech communities were the oral part of communication.  Imagined communities were communities in which a society knew others existed, but never came into contact with them.  Would this really be a community then?  I believe that the teacher in the classroom of either the academy or on the streets of common knowledge get to decide that.  They can form their own image of what makes academics work the best through literacy or art, but the person teaching others gets to decide that.  Hopefully the teacher is correct in what they are saying and puts cultural and linguistic ideas out there for their student to grasp onto.  As a society, we can only hope!!