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Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”, discusses the idea of the arts of the contact zone. The essay has a lot of distracting short stories that do not deliver the complete concept of the contact zone. A contact zone is basically is where cultures and people come to share different ideas and believes. Transculturation and ethnography were the main ideas the author explained the contact zone. The main idea was clear, but still had lots of irrelevant and bad examples.
Pratt only gives examples of negative or bad contact zones, and does not give any examples of productive ones, such as the United Nations were people from around the world with different cultures, believes, and mentalities gather in one room to discuss how to make the world a better place, and keep trying to come up with a solution that will result in world peace.
Pratt’s first example was her son and his baseball cards, it is a very interesting but confusing subject. How pieces of paper related to the contact zone. The Baseball cards taught Sam about geography, every player is from a different place, which Sam learned about, by that small detail he learned a new country and at least a single fact about it. It also taught him confidence, because of his knowledge of baseball he now know can interact with any adult and share their opinions. One of the biggest lessons he was taught is economics, how every card and player have a different price or value, how to trade and get a better team reflects on how he will perform in the business world when he grows up. I don’t see how this would directly reflect on her subject and the contact zone, Pratt should really reconsider this example, even though it is a very fascinating project.
The second example the author gives is Guaman Poma who is a Mistizo, He wrote a 1200 page to the king of Spain. The letter was lost and later found, it has been divided into two Parts. The new Chronicle and “good government and justice”. The first part had lots of information and was basically describing the American conquest from the Spanish perspective, but was not able to meet its goals or deliver the information the way it was intended. The second part He tries to explain how good government and justice can be met by teamwork between the Spanish and the Inca. Guaman Poma’s example was her best example of the contact zone. For it sets an example for individual interaction and of transculturation where strategies are dragged from the language or a portion of another individual to make a point.
Pratt talks about unrelated topics in this essay which distract the reader from the whole perspective of the contact zone. From all examples the best one would be Guaman Poma’s letter, which magnificently describes the contact zone and its types. The rest were like a history lesson that is far apart from the contact zone.
Pratt alluded to a course at Stanford University that invited understudies from all societies and foundations; it gave the chance to understudies to view and communicate with the world's purpose of perspectives. That is an extraordinary application of a "Contact Zone" The understudies had the capacity direct profound productive dialogs and increase more elevated amounts of insight and mindfulness; it had a genuine case of confronting cliché false convictions. A few understudies confronted a society stun. Be that as it may, everybody must have finished with an incredible experience.
The entire purpose of the paper is to indicate the importance of a "Contact Zone" which can be characterized as the touchy zone that is under the contention were countries, individuals or whatever other thing, conflicts, meet and convey, likewise profoundly identified with authoethnography and transculturally. Pratt had the capacity characterize a piece of it, the samples were not all strong. Stressing the abnormal state of theory introduced in Pratt's work yet the given data are occupying and more than what characterizing the term merits
