High School A Community Within AContact Zone
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Mary Louise Pratt, the author of Arts of the Contact Zone, states that a contact zone is a "social space 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" (607). Pratt uses, in her essay, the example of Guaman Poma, an Andean who claimed Inca descent, and King Phillip III of Spain. Poma wrote a twelve hundred-page letter with four hundred illustrations to the king and Spaniards proposing nothing less than a new view of the world. The letter began by rewriting the history of Christendom to include the original people of America, and then went to describe the history and life ways of Andean people and their leader. It began by a revisionist explanation of the Spanish conquest, and hundreds of pages documenting and criticizing Spanish exploitation and abuse. At the end of Guaman Poma's letter is an interview in which he proposes a new form of government through teamwork of Andean and Spanish elites.
Mary Louise Pratt showed how Poma uses not only his native language, but also the language of his conqueror (King Phillip III) to asses what Spain was doing to his people. Pratt argues that Poma "mirrors back to the Spanish (in their language, which is alien to him) an image of themselves that they often suppress and will therefore recognize. Such as the dynamics of language, writing, and representation in contact zones" (610). I think this explains well what happens in a contact zone...