The Arts Of The Contact Zone Summary

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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 …show more content…

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’,

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