The Contact Zone (theoretical concept)

In a 1991 keynote address to the Modern Language Association titled “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of “the contact zone.” She articulated, “I use 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 lived out in many parts of the world today” (34). Pratt described a site for linguistic and cultural encounters, wherein power is negotiated and struggle occurs. Although when introduced this term was in the context of literacy and literary theories, the term has been appropriated to conversations across the humanities and has been used in the context of feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory and in discussions of teaching and pedagogy. The contact zone is similar to other concepts that address relationality and contiguity such as positionality, standpoint theory, perspectivism, intersectionality, and relationality (24).

In "Arts of the Contact Zone," Pratt describes a manuscript from 1613 penned by Andean man named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. The manuscript was a letter written to King Phillip III of Spain and was titled The First New Chronicle and Good Government. The manuscript details Spanish conquest in South America. Pratt cites the manuscript as an example of autoethnography. She writes, “Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed to call an authethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (35). The New Chronicle ends with a revisionist account of the Spanish conquest. Pratt uses the manuscript as an example of an oppressed person or group resisting hegemony, and she connects the practice of authoethnography, critique and resistance to the creation of contact zones.

Pratt also shares the example of Poma’s New Chronicle to give an example of “transculturation” or a term that ethnographers have used “to describe the process whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant metropolitan culture” (36). Additionally, Pratt gives the origin of the term “transculturation,” writing, “The term, originally coined by Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940, aimed to replace concepts of acculturation and assimilation used to characterize culture under conquest” (36). Pratt confirms “Transculturation, like autoethnography, is a phenomenon of the contact zone” (36).

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