The Arts Of The Contact Zone Summary

In her thought-provoking lecture, “The Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt stirs the interest of her readers by raising an important argument. She strings together various anecdotes, from crediting historical authors to speaking about her personal experience, to convey her thoughts that contact zones undermine the ideas generated by society that cause one to believe falsities about the community. In addition, contact zones allow people from different backgrounds to acquire new perspectives of the others’ respective cultures, thus dissipating the ignorance they once held. Therefore, by utilizing and crediting her sources, she effectively delivers her argument about the benefits of contact zones to her audience.

Pratt opens up her

essay by sharing a personal anecdote about her son, Sam. She inaugurates that Sam’s love of collecting baseball cards “opened the door to baseball books, shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, magazines, histories, biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, even poems” (317). As a result, her son learned about the world from different angles and acquired a higher level of maturity throughout his preadolescent years. Telling the readers a personal story, Pratt introduces to her readers a coined term called the “contact zone,” in which “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (319). The author utilizes the art of pathos to connect herself to the readers by delivering an anecdote about her own son, indicating that the “contact zone” applies to anyone and anything in society, one of which includes Sam and his love for baseball cards.
Shifting from her personal anecdote, Pratt immediately changes her rhetorical strategy by crediting an author who lived several centuries back in order to explain the term “contact zone” and how it functions in society.

She discusses about a historical text that “has a few points in common with baseball cards” (318), in which it was published by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. The manuscript contains a mixture of Quechua and Spanish, and is addressed to King Philip III of Spain. Guaman Poma’s letter is split into two parts: the first of which is called Nueva coronica, “New Chronicle,” and serves as “the main writing apparatus through which the Spanish presented their American conquests to themselves” (319). This first half of the text introduces one distinctive phenomenon of the contact zone: the autoethnographic text, in which it involves collaborations with people from different social and intellectual backgrounds “to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding” (320). “New Chronicle” rewrites the Christian history and the Spanish conquest to paint a new picture of the world, where the Andean people lie in the center, not the Europeans. At the end of the first half, Guaman Poma argues that there should have been a peaceful encounter between the Spanish and the Inca, thereby forming a potential for benefiting both parties, not just one. Finishing explaining Guaman Poma’s letter, Pratt quickly connects his letter to the contact zone, making an argument that the art of the contact zone illustrates a picture of the oppressors, the Europeans, from the oppressed, the Andeans’,

perspective.
Pratt then transitions into the second half of the ancient manuscript, Buen gobierno y justicia, “Good Government and Justice,” which “combines a description of colonial society in the Andean region with a passionate denunciation of Spanish exploitation and abuse” (322). Guaman Poma criticizes the Spanish oppression of the Incas, and argues that what “constitutes “good government and justice” is “through a collaboration of Inca and Spanish elites” (322). The second half of the text incorporates another distinctive phenomenon of the contact zone: transculturation. Guaman Poma utilizes transculturation by selecting pieces from the Spanish conquest, and then mixing these pieces with the Andean culture to “express (bilingually, mind you) Andean interests and aspirations” (323), thus creating an adaptation of two different cultures. Using Guaman Poma’s historical text with the rhetorical strategy of ethos, Pratt credits the author to describe the contact zone’s functions. She explains the two phenomenon, autoethnographic text and transculturation, from the letter, as an example, to paint a picture of the Spanish and Inca peacefully mingling with each other and creating a new culture from elements from the Spanish and Andean cultures, resulting in a contact zone.
Quickly moving on, Pratt continues to discuss about the contact zone itself. She defines the coined term as an intention “to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture that gets done in the academy” (325). She resumes using the power of ethos to source Benedict Anderson, who refers to the way communities perceive themselves as “imagined communities” (325). As a result, Anderson indicates that people actually differ than what they are conceived as. Switching back to pathos, Pratt once again personally connects to her audience by narrating another anecdote of her fourth grader, Manuel. He received a writing assignment, in which his teacher required him to answer a series of questions, indicating that such requirements merely satisfy the interests of the authority. Thus, similar to Guaman Poma, Manuel presented to his teacher an unprofessional written reply, attempting to resist those who possess power over him.
To end her argument, Pratt delivers one final personal anecdote, in which she discusses with her audience about her experience at a university she works at. She recalls that the university designed a course “that centered on the Americas and the multiple cultural histories (including European ones) that have intersected here” (328). The course was based upon the contact zone, where it attracted a very diverse student population. As a result, students originating from completely different cultures experience the ignorance and hostility of other cultures, while basking in moments of revelation and mutual understanding. Pratt concludes that through her experience at the university, the students gained new perspectives and understandings of others from different backgrounds. Therefore, she advocates more classes to be integrated into universities, where these classes allow people from a variety of cultures engage with each other, breaking the barriers full of ignorance and hostility and bringing them together closer to unity.
Through the arts of ethos and pathos, Pratt sparks the interest of and persuades her audience. She supports her argument with a wide range of anecdotes, from historical to personal, while also implementing her own thoughts about the contact zone, in which she advocates classes that allows different cultures to meld together and create a revitalizing experience for the people. Therefore, Pratt thoroughly presents her argument to her audience, that contact zones indeed benefit society, opening up new perspectives about the world, including cultures.