pink elephant

Pratt summary

In “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Mary Pratt develops a term called contact zone and refers to it to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contest of highly asymmetrical relation of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” (Pratt 34). Her idea of the contact zone is intended to compare and “refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other.” The intention of the contact zone is to contrast with ideas of communities that trigger much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture that gets done in the academy. Usually seen in literature arts, dynamics of language, writing, and representation.

Pratt identifies to phenomenon’s of the contact zone, Transculturation and autoethnography. She describes the term transcultureation to “describe processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent for materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (Pratt 36). Autoethnography is described as a text “in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made them” (Pratt 35). She argues this phenomena by using Guaman Poma’s “unreadable” text: New Chronicle and Good Government in the twentieth century. Both these literate arts are becoming more visible, more pressing, and more decipherable in today’s writing.

Pratt then goes on to explain language in communities and in contact zones by the utopian sense of language in current thinking about speech communities through imagined communities and normative assumptions of unified and homogenous speech communities and so unified and homogenous social worlds. She concludes by addressing the teaching and learning in the contact zone through education and the university.