The Contact Zone

Illegal Contact!

       Mary Louise Pratt writes about what she calls the contact zone in "The Arts of the Contact Zone." She gives the example of her son and him acquiring knowledge from the time spent with his baseball cards. The information he learned gave him a point of contact to have intelligible conversations with adults. Pratt defines contact zone as "the 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 are lived out in many parts of the world today." Her main example is the autoethnographic text written by Guaman Poma. European and Andean cultures clashed in multiple ways, including through language, societal ideas, and governmental ideas. She lastly explains how she brought the contact zone to college students who wrestled with cultural and historic events from all of their races of origin.

       The contact zones that Pratt describes are a lot like poetry. Pratt explains that contact zones have to be applicable to everyone and they inspire feelings of "rage, incomprehension, and pain," as well as understanding and awe. Aristotle's arguments in Poetics support this idea. He explains that poetry must be relatable to all people because this will cause a greater sense of emotion in those who feel connected to the ideas and story that the poet portrays in his art. Eliot's argument of tradition and good art in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" also supports this idea. Poetry is that which conveys truth in a way which hasn't been organized in such a way before but has a sense of timelessness. It forces a sense of emotion from the truth, or -- in Pratt's argument -- historic and cultural events, and not emotion from the poet, teacher, or any speaker of the truth.

Has there been any later research or historic findings that explain why Guaman Poma's letter never reached King Philip III?