516

and Portuguese. She served as president of the Modern Language

for 2003.
Pratt is the author of Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary UlSCOu,..,
(1977) and coauthor of Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America (1
the textbook Linguistics for Students of Literature (1980), Amor Brujo:
Images and Culture of Love in the Andes (1990), and Imperial Eyes:
in Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). The essay that follows
revised to serve as the introduction to Imperial Eyes, which is particularly
European travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when
:J was" discovering" Africa and the Americas. It argues that travel writing
"the rest of the world" for European readers. It didn 't "report" on Africa or
America; it produced an "Africa" or an "America" for European consun
Travel writing produced places that could be thought of as barren, empty,
oped, inconceivable, needful of European influence and control, ready to
European industrial, intellectual, and commercial interests. The reports of
ers or, later, scientists and anthropologists are part of a more general process
which the emerging industrial nations took possession of new territory.
The European understanding of Peru, for example, came through European
counts, not from attempts to understand or elicit responses from Andeans,
vian natives. Such a response was delivered, when an Andean, Guaman
wrote to King Philip III of Spain, but his letter was unreadable. Pratt is
in just those moments of contact between peoples and cultures. She is in
how King Philip read (or failed to read) a letter from Peru, but also in how
like Guaman Poma prepared himself to write to the king of Spain. To fix these
ments, she makes use of a phrase she coined, the "contact zone," which, she
I use to refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which
peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact
with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving
conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. ...
By using the term"contact," I aim to foreground the interactive, im
provisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or
suppressed by diffusionis t accounts of conquest and domination. A
"contact" perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and
by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers
and colonized, or travelers and "travelees," not in terms of separateness
or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking un
derstandings and practices.
Like Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing

as Re-Vision" (and, for that matter, Clifford Geertz's "Deep

Play"), "Arts of the Contact Zone" was first written as a

lecture. It was delivered as a keynote address at the second

Modern Language Association Literacy Conference, held in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1990.

Arts of the Contact Zone

Whenever the subject of literacy comes up, what often pops first into my
is a conversation I overheard eight years ago between my son Sam
and his best friend, Willie, aged six and seven, respectively: "Why don't you
trade me Many Trails for Carl Yats ... Yesits ... Ya-strum-scrum." "That's
~ot how you say it, dummy, it's Carl Yes ... Yes ... oh, I don't know." Sam
and Willie had just discovered baseball cards. Many Trails was their decod
ing, with the help of first-grade English phonics, of the name Manny Trillo.
The name they were quite rightly stumped on was Carl Yastrzemski. That
was the first time I remembered seeing them put their incipient literacy to
their own use, and I was of course thrilled.
.
Sam and Willie learned a lot about phonics that year by trying to deci
surnames on baseball cards, and a lot about cities, states, heights,
places of birth, stages of life. In the years that followed, I watched
apply his arithmetic skills to working out batting averages and sub
retirement years from rookie years; I watched him develop senses
patternirtg and order by arranging and rearranging his cards for hours
end, and aesthetic judgment by comparing different photos, different
layouts, and color schemes. American geography and history took
in his mind through baseball cards. Much of his social life revolved
trading them, and he learned about exchange, fairness, trust, the irn
i DOrt~nce of processes as opposed to results, what it means to get cheated,
advantage of, even robbed. Baseball cards were the medium of his
~nomic life too. Nowhere better to learn the power and arbitrariness of
, the absolute divorce between use value and exchange value, no
of long- and short-term investment, the possibility of personal values
are independent of market values.
Baseball cards meant baseball card shows, where there was much to be
Io:-.ned about adult worlds as well. And baseball cards opened the door to
!~aseball books, shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, magazines, histo
biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, even poems.
learned the history of American racism and the struggle against it
baseball; he saw the Depression and two world wars from behind
plate. He learned the meanirtg of commodified labor, what it means
one's body and talents to be owned and dispensed by another. He
something about Japan, Taiwan, Cuba, and Central America and
men and boys do things there. Through the history and experience of
I stadiums he thought about architecture, light, wind, topography,
~IP"rology, the dynamics of public space. He learned the meanirtg of ex
of knOWing about something well enough that you can start a con
~SMi,,~ with a stranger and feel sure of holding your own. Even with an
y with an adult. Throughout his preadolescent years,
history was Sam's luminous point of contact with grown-ups, his

519
518
lifeline to caring. And, of course, all this time he was also playing b
struggling his way through the stages of the local Little League
lucky enough to be a pretty good player, loving the game and COIl\m~.t
know deeply his strengths and weaknesses.
Literacy began for Sam with the newly pronounceable names on
picture cards and brought him what has been easily the broadest
'
varied, most enduring, and most integrated experience of his
life. Like many parents, I was delighted to see schooling give Sam
tools with which to find and open all these doors. At the same
found it unforgivable that schooling itself gave him nothing
meaningful to do, let alone anything that would actually take him
the referential, masculinist ethos of baseball and its lore.
However, I was not invited here to speak as a parent, nor as an
on literacy. I was asked to speak as an MLA [Modern Language
tion] member working in the elite academy. In that capacity my
tion is undoubtedly supposed to be abstract, irrelevant, and
outside the real world. I wouldn'~ dr~m of disappointing anyone. I
pose immediately to head back seve'ral centuries to a text that has a
points in common with baseball cards and raises thoughts about
Tony Sarmiento, in his comments to the conference, called new
literacy. In 1908 a Peruvianist named Richard Pietschmann was
in the Danish Royal Archive in Copenhagen and came across a
script. It was dated in the city of Cuzco in Peru, in the year 1613,
forty years after the final fall of the Inca empire to the Spanish and
with an unmistakably Andean indigenous name: Felipe Guaman
de Ayala. Written in a mixture of Quechua and ungrammatical,
sive Spanish, the manuscript was a letter addressed by an unknown
apparently literate Andean to King Philip III of Spain. What
Pietschmann was that the letter was twelve hundred pages long.
were almost eight hundred pages of written text and four hund
captioned line drawings. It was titled Th e First New Chronicle and
Government, No one knew (or knows) how the manuscript got to
brary in Copenhagen or how long it had been there . No one, it
had ever bothered to read it or figured out how. Quechua was
thought of as a written language in 1908, nor Andean culture as a
culture.
' Pietschmann prepared a paper on his find, which he .
London in 1912, a year after the rediscovery of Machu Picchu br
Bingham. Reception, by an international congress of AmericaJUstsl
apparently confused. It took twenty-five years for a facsimile ..
the work to appear in Paris. It was not till the late 1970s, as positiVist
ing habits gave way to interpretive studies and colonial eliti~rns to
colonial pluralisms, that Western scholars found ways of readtng
Poma's New Chronicle and Good Government as the extraordinary
tural tour de force that it was. The letter got there, only 350 years
a miracle and a terrible tragedy.

I propose to say a few more words about this erstwhile unreadable

in order to layout some thoughts about writing and literacy in what I
to call the contact zones. I use this term to refer to social spaces where
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of
asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or
aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.
Il'.velltually I will use the term to reconsider the models of community that
of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under chal
today. But first a little more about Guaman Poma's giant letter to
Ill.
Insofar as anything is known about him at all, Guaman Poma exempli
the sociocultural complexities produced by conquest and empire. He
an indigenous Andean who claimed noble Inca descent and who had
t.tlnnted (at least in some sense) Christianity. He may have worked in the
colonial administration as an interpreter, scribe, or assistant to a
tax collector-as a mediator, in short. He says he learned to write
his half brother, a mestizo whose Spanish father had given him ac
to religious education.
Guaman Poma's letter to the king is written in two languages (Spanish
Quechua) and two parts, The first is called the Nueva cor6nica, "New
" The title is important. The chronicle of course was the main
apparatus through which the Spanish presented their American
punquests to themselves. It constituted one of the main official discourses.
writing a "new chronicle," Guaman Porn a took over the official Spanish
for his own ends. Those ends were, roughly, to construct a new pic
of the world, a picture of a Christian world with Andean rather than
'Dean peoples at the center of it-Cuzco, not Jerusalem. In the New
Guaman Poma begins by rewriting the Christian history of the
from Adam and Eve (Fig. 1 [po 520]), incorporating the Amerindi
into it as offspring of one of the sons of Noah. He identifies five ages
Christian history that he links in parallel with the five ages of canonical
history-separate but equal trajectories that diverge with Noah
reintersect not with Columbus but with Saint Bartholomew, claimed
have preceded Columbus in the Americas. In a couple of hundred
.Guaman Poma constructs a veritable encyclopedia of Inca and pre
history, customs, laws, social forms, public offices, and dynastic lead
The depictions resemble European manners and customs description,
also reproduce the meticulous detail with which knowledge in Inca
Was stored on quipus and in the oral memories of elders,
Poma's New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed
an autoethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people un
to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations
have made of them. Thus if ethnographic texts are those in which
metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usu
:eir conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations
e SO-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those

521

520

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between Guaman Porn a and the Inca elders who were his informants.
as in Guaman Poma, it involves more than one language. In recent
autoethnography, critique, and resistance have reconnected with
in a contemporary creation of the contact zone, the testimonio.
Porn a's New Chronicle ends with a revisionist account of the
conquest, which, he argues, should have been a peaceful en,
of equals with the potential for benefiting both, but for the mindgreed of the Spanish. He parodies Spanish history. Following contact
the Incas, he writes, "In all Castille, there was a great commotion. All
and at night in their dreams the Spaniards were saying, 'Yndias,
oro, plata, oro, plata del Piru' " ("Indies, Indies, gold, silver, gold, sil
from Peru") (Fig. 2) . The Spanish, he writes, brought nothing of value
share with the Andeans, nothing "but armor and guns con la codicia de
plata oro y plata, yndias, a las Yndias, Piru" ("with the lust for gold,
gold and silver, Indies, the Indies, Peru") (372) . I quote these words
an example of a conquered subject using the conqueror's language to
a parodic, oppositional representation of the conqueror's own

.'

Figure 1. Adam and Eve.

texts . Autoethnographic texts are not, then, what are usually thought

autochthonous forms of expression or self-representation (as the

quipus were). Rather they involve a selective collaboration with and

propriation of idioms of the metropolis or

the conqueror. These
merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to

self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of

derstanding. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to both

politan audiences and the speaker's own community. Their rpception'l

thus highly indeterminate. Such texts often constitute

a
-.
group's point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture. It ~s

teresting to think, for example, of American slave autobiograph~ 11\

autoethnographic dimensions, which in some respects distinguish it

Euramerican autobiographical tradition. The concept might help

why some of the earliest published writing by Chicanas took the

folkloric manners and customs sketches written in English and

in English-language newspapers or folklore magazines (see

Autoethnographic representation often involves concrete
between people, as between literate ex-slaves and abolitionist

Figure 2. Conquista. Meeting of Spaniard and Inca. The Inca says in

Quechua, "You eat this gold?"' Spaniard replies in Spanish,

"We eat this gold."

523

522

speech. Guaman Poma mirrors back to the Spanish (in their

which is alien to him) an image of themselves that they often SUppress
will therefore surely recognize. Such are the dynamics of language, '
ing, and representation in contact zones.
The second half of the epistle continues the critique. It is titled
gobierno y justicia, "Good Government and Justice," and combines a
scription of colonial society in the Andean region with a passionate
nunciation of Spanish exploitation and abuse. (These, at the time he
writing, were decimating the population of the Andes at a genocidal
In fact, the potential loss of the labor force became a main cause for
of the system.) Guaman Poma's most implacable hostility is invoked by
clergy, followed by the dreaded corregidores, or colonial overseers (Fig.
He also praises good works, Christian habits, and just men where he
them, and offers at length his views as to what constitutes "good
ment and justice." The Indies, he argues, should be administered
a collaboration of Inca and Spanish elites. The epistle ends with an
nary question-and-answer session in which, in a reversal of hierarchy,

Figure 3. Corregidor de minas. Catalog of Spanish abuses

of indigenous labor force.

Icing is depicted asking Guaman Poma questions about how to reform the
eItlpire--a dialogue imagined across the many lines that divide the An
dean scribe from the imperial monarch, and in which the subordinated
ubject single-handedly gives himself authority in the colonizer's lan
~age and verbal repertoire. In a way, it worked-this extraordinary text
did get written-but in a way it did not, for the letter never reached its
addressee.
To grasp the import of Guaman Poma's project, one needs to keep in
mind that the Incas had no system of writing. Their huge empire is said to
be the only known instance of a full-blown bureaucratic state society built
and administered without writing. Guaman Poma constructs his text by
appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the
invaders. He does not simply imitate or reproduce it; he selects and
adapts it along Andean lines to express (bilingually, mind you) Andean
interests and aspirations. Ethnographers have used the term transcultura
tion to describe processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal
groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or
metropolitan culture. The term, originally coined by Cuban sociologist
Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, aimed to replace overly reductive concepts of
:acculturation and assimilation used to characterize culture under con
While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates
the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what
absorbed into their own and what it gets used for. Transculturation,
autoethnography, is a phenomenon of the contact zone.
As scholars have realized only relatively recently, the transcultural
racter of Guaman Poma's text is intricately apparent in its visual as
as its written component. The genre of the four hundred line draw
is European-there seems to have been no tradition of representa
drawing among the Incas-but in their execution they deploy
___lucally Andean systems of spatial symbolism that express Andean
and aspirations. 1
In Figure 1, for instance, Adam is depicted on the left-hand side below
sun, While Eve is on the right-hand side below the moon, and slightly
than Adam. The two are divided by the diagonal of Adam's digging
In Andean spatial symbolism, the diagonal descending from the sun
the basic line of power and authority dividing upper from lower,
~rorn female, dominant from subordinate. In Figure 2, the Inca ap
m the same position as Adam, with the Spaniard opposite, and the
at the same height. In Figure 3, depicting Spanish abuses of power,
;Vrnbol~c pattern is reversed. The Spaniard is in a high position indi
dornInance, but on the "wrong" (right-hand) side. The diagonals of
and that of the servant doing the flogging mark out a line of illegiti
t~ough real, power. The Andean figures continue to occupy the left
SIde of the picture, but clearly as victims. Guaman Pama wrote that
l)an;~1.. conquest h a d pro d uced un
U
d 0 aI reves, " "a world in
mun

525

524

...

,I

In sum, Guaman Poma's text is truly a product of the contact

one thinks of cultures, or literatures, as discrete, coherently
monolingual edifices, Guaman Poma's text, and indeed any a
graphiC work, appears anomalous or chaotic-as it apparently did to
European scholars Pietschmann spoke to in 1912. If one does not
cultures this way, then Guaman Poma's text is simply
the Andean region was itself and remains today. Such a text is
neous on the reception end as well as the production end: it will read
differently to people in different positions in the contact zone. BecaUSfllI
deploys European and Andean systems of meaning making, the letter
essarily means differently to bilingual Spanish-Quechua speakers and
monolingual speakers in either language; the drawings mean differentl
to monocultural readers, Spanish or Andean, and to bicultural
responding to the Andean symbolic structures embodied in E
genres.
In the Andes in the early 1600s there existed a literate public with
siderable intercultural competence and degrees of bilingualism.
nately, such a community did not exist in the Spanish court with
Guaman Poma was trying to make contact. It is interesting to note
the same year Guaman Poma sent off his letter, a text by another
was adopted in official circles in Spain as the canonical Christian
tion between the Spanish conquest and Inca history. It was another
encyclopedic work, titled the Royal Commentaries of the Incas,
tellingly, by a mestizo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Like the mestizo
brother who taught Guaman Poma to read and write, Inca Garcilaso
the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish official, and had lived in
since he was seventeen. Though he too spoke Quechua, his book is
in eloquent, standard Spanish, without illustrations. While
Poma's life's work sat somewhere unread, the Royal Commentaries
edited and reedited in Spain and the New World, a mediation that
the Andean past and present in ways thought unthreatening to
hierarch y 2 The textual hierarchy persists; the Royal Commentaries today
mains a staple item on Ph.D. reading lists in Spanish, while the
Chronicle and Good Government, despite the ready availability of
fine editions, is not. However, though Guaman Poma's text did not
its destination, the transcultural currents of expression it exemplifies
tinued to evolve in the Andes, as they still do, less in writing than
storytelling, ritual, song, dance-drama, painting and sculpture, dress,
a
tile art, forms of governance, religiOUS belief, and many other vern (
art forms. All express the effects of long-term contact and intractable,
equal conflict.
! Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration,
j ism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernac~
J expression-these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone.
prehenSion, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, .
heterogeneity of meaning-these are some of the perils of writing JIl

zone. They all live among us today in the transnationalized me

tropolis of the United States and are becoming more widely visib le, more
pressing, and, like Guaman Poma's text, more deCipherable to those who
once would have ignored them in defense of a stable, centered sense of
}cnowledge and reality.

Contact and Community

idea of the contact zone is intended in part to contrast with ideas
community that underlie much of the thinking about language, com
munication, and culture that gets done in the academy. A couple of years
ago, thinking about the linguistic theories I knew, I tried to make sense of
a utopian quality that often seemed to characterize social analyses of lan
guage by the academy. Languages were seen as living in "speech commu
nities," and these tended to be theorized as discrete, self-defined, coherent
entities, held together by a homogeneous competence or grammar shared
identically and equally among all the members. This abstract idea of the
speech community seemed to reflect, among other things, the utopian
way modern nations conceive of themselves as what Benedict Anderson
calls "imagined communities.,,3 In a book of that title, Anderson observes
that with the possible exception of what he calls "primordial villages,"
human communities exist as imagined entities in which people "will never
know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet
in the mind of each lives the image of their communion." "Communities
are distinguished," he goes on to say, "not by their falsity/ genuineness,
but by the style in which they are imagined" (15; emphasis mine) . Anderson
proposes three features that characterize the style in which the modern
nation is imagined . First, it is imagined as limited, by "finite, if elastic,
boundaries"; second, it is imagined as sovereign; and, third, it is imagined
asfraternal, "a deep, horizontal comradeship" for which millions of people
are prepared "not so much to kill as willingly to die" (15). As the image
Suggests, the nation-community is embodied metonymically in the finite,
SOvereign, fraternal figure of the citizen-soldier.
Anderson argues that European bourgeoisies were distinguished by
their ability to "achieve solidarity on an essentially imagined basis" (74)
on a scale far greater than that of elites of other times and places. Writ
ing and literacy playa central role in this argument. Anderson maintains,
have others, that the main instrument that made bourgeois nation
. projects possible was print capitalism. The commercial circula
of books in the various European vernaculars, he argues, was what
created the invisible networks that would eventually constitute the
elites and those they ruled as nations. (Estimates are that 180 mil
books were put into circulation in Europe between the years 1500
1600 alone.)
Now obviously this style of imagining of modern nations, as Anderson
it, is strongly utopian, embodying values like equality, fraternity,

526
liberty, which the societies often profess but systematically fail to
The prototype of the modern nation as imagined community w
seemed to me, mirrored in ways people thought about language an~
speech community. Many commentators have pointed out how
views of language as code and competence assume a unified and
neous social world in which language exists as a shared pa
device, precisely, for imagining community. An image of a
shared literacy is also part of the picture. The prototypical
of language is generally taken to be the speech of individual adult
speakers face-to-face (as in Saussure's famous diagram) in
even monodialectal situations-in short, the most homogeneous case
guistically and socially. The same goes for written communication.
one could certainly imagine a theory that assumed different
argued, for instance, that the most revealing speech situation for
standing language was one involving a gathering of people each of
spoke two languages and understood a third and held only one
in common with any of the others. It depends on what workings of
guage you want to see or want to see first, on what you choose to
normative.
In keeping with autonomous, fraternal models of community,
of language use commonly assume that principles of cooperation
shared understanding are normally in effect. Descriptions of
between people in conversation, classrooms, medical and bureaucratic
tings, readily take it for granted that the situation is governed by a .
set of rules or norms shared by all participants. The analysis focuses
on how those rules produce or fail to produce an orderly, coherent
change. Models involving games and moves are often used to describe
teractions. Despite whatever conflicts or systematic social differenct
might be in play, it is assumed that all participants are engaged in
same game and that the game is the same for all players. Often it is. But
course it often is not, as, for example, when speakers are from
classes or cultures, or one party is exercising authority and another is
mitting to it or questioning it. Last year one of my children moved to'
new elementary school that had more open classrooms and more
curricula than the conventional school he started out in. A few days
the term, we asked him what it was like at the new school. "Well," he
"they're a lot nicer, and they have a lot less rules. But know why
"
nicer?" "Why?" I asked. "So you'll obey all the rules they don't have,
replied . This is a very coherent analysis with considerable elegance
explanatory power, but probably not the one his teacher would
given.
When linguistic (or literate) interaction is described in terms of
ness, games, moves, or scripts, usually only legitimate moves are
.
named as part of the system, where legitimacy is defined from the pomt
view of the party in authority-regardless of what other parties might
themselves as doing. Teacher-pupil language, for example, tends to

527
~rnLJ<=U almost entirely from the point of view of the teacher and teach

not from the point of view of pupils and pupiling (the word doesn't
exist, though the thing certainly does). If a classroom is analyzed as a
world unified and homogenized with respect to the teacher, whatstudents do other than what the teacher specifies is invisible or
to the analysis. This can be true in practice as well. On several
my fourth grader, the one busy obeying all the rules they didn't
was given writing assignments that took the form of answering a se
of questions to build up a paragraph. These questions often asked him
identify with the interests of those in power over him-parents, teach
doctors, public authorities. He invariably sought ways to resist or sub
these assignments. One assignment, for instance, called for imagining
helpful invention." The students were asked to write Single-sentence
t.esponses to the following questions:
What kind of invention would help you?

How would it help you?

Why would you need it?

What would it look like?

Would other people be able to use it also?

What would be an invention to help your teacher?

What would be an invention to help your parents?

's reply read as follows :

A grate adventchin
Some inventchins are GRATE!!!!!!!!!!! My inventchin would be a
shot that would put every thing you learn at school in your
brain. It would help me by letting me graduate right now'! I
would need it because it would let me play with my friends, go
on vacachin and, do fun a lot more. It would look like a regular
shot. Ather peaple would use to. This inventchin would help
my teacher parents get away from a lot of work. I think a shot
like this would be GRATE!
the spelling, the aSSignment received the usual star to indicate the
had been fulfilled in an acceptable way. No recognition was available,
ItIOWever, of the humor, the attempt to be critical or contestatory, to par
the structures of authority. On that score, Manuel's luck was only
better than Guaman Poma's. What is the place of unsolicited op
discourse, parody, resistance, critique in the imagined class
community? Are teachers supposed to feel that their teaching has
most Successful when they have eliminated such things and unified
SOcial world, probably in their own image? Who wins when we do
Who loses?
SUch questions may be hypothetical, because in the United States in
1990s , many teachers find themselves less and less able to do that even
they Want to. The composition of the national collectivity is changing

528
and so are the styles, as Anderson put it, in which it is being imagined.
the 1980s in many nation-states, imagined national syntheses that had!
tained hegemonic force began to dissolve. Internal social groups with his
tories and lifeways different from the official ones began insisting on
histories and lifeways as part of their citizenship, as the very mode of their
me~bership in the national collectivity. ~ their dialogues with dominan~
Institutions, many groups began asserting a rhetonc of belonging that
made demands beyond those of representation and basic rights granted
from above. In universities we started to hear, "I don't just want you to let
me be here, I want to belong here; this institution should belong to me as:
much as. it does to anyone ~ls/e.". Institutions ~ave responded with, among:
other things, rhetoncs of diverSity and multiculturalism whose import ai
this moment is up for grabs across the ideological spectrum.
These shifts are being lived out by everyone working in euucanoa
today, and everyone is challenged by them in one way or another.
of us committed to educational democracy are particularly challenged
that notion finds itself besieged on the public agenda. Many of those
govern us display, openly, their interest in a quiescent, ignorant, mani
lable electorate. Even as an ideal, the concept of an enlightened citi?"
seems to have disappeared from the national imagination. A couple of
ago the university where I work went through an intense and wren
debate over a narrowly defined Western-culture requirement that
been instituted there in 1980. It kept boiling down to a debate over
ideas of national patrimony, cultural citizenship, and imagined com
nity. In the end, the requirement was transformed into a much
broadly defined course called Cultures, Ideas, Values. 4 In the context
the change, a new course was designed that centered on the Americas
the multiple cultural histories (including European ones) that have
sected here. As you can imagine, the course attracted a very diverse
dent body. The classroom functioned not like a homogeneous comml
or a horizontal alliance but like a contact zone. Every single text we
stood in specific historical relationships to the students in the class, but
range and variety of historical relationships in play were enorrn(
Everybody had a stake in nearly everything we read, but the range
kind of stakes varied widely.

It was the most exciting teaching we had ever done, and also the

est. We were struck, for example, at how anomalous the formal lecture

came in a contact zone (who can forget Atahuallpa throwing down

Bible because it would not speak to him?) . The lecturer's traditional

ined) task-unifying the world in the class's eyes by means of a

logue that rings equally coherent, revealing, and true for all, forging an
hoc community, homogeneous with respect to one's own words
task became not only impossible but anomalous and unimaginable.
stead, one had to work in the knowledge that whatever one said
going to be systematically received in radically heterogeneous ways
we were neither able nor entitled to prescribe.

529
The very nature of the course put ideas and identities on the line. All
the students in the class had the experience, for example, of hearing their
culture discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them; all the stu
dents saw their roots traced back to legacies of both glory and shame; all
the students experienced face-to-face the ignorance and incomprehension,
and occasionally the hostility, of others. In the absence of community val
ues and the hope of synthesis, it was easy to forget the positives; the fact,
for instance, that kinds of marginalization once taken for granted were
gone. Virtually every student was having the experience of seeing the
world described with him or her in it. Along with rage, incomprehension,
and pain, there were exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mu
tual understanding, and new wisdom-the joys of the contact zone. The
sufferings and revelations were, at different moments to be sure, experi
enced by every student. No one was excluded, and no one was safe.
The fact that no one was safe made all of us involved in the course ap
preciate the importance of what we came to call "safe houses. " We used the
term to refer to social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute
themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high
degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies
of oppression. This is why, as we realized, multicultural curricula should
not seek to replace ethnic or women's studies, for example. Where there are
legacies of subordination, groups need places for healing and mutual recog
nition, safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, knowl
edges, claims on the world that they can then bring into the contact zone.
Meanwhile, our job in the Americas course remains to figure out how
to make that crossroads the best site for learning that it can be. We are
looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will include, we
are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, inter
ests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and
collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison (in
cluding unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural
forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with sup
~ressed aspects of history (including their own histories), ways to move
mto and out of rhetorics of authenticity; ground rules for communication
acr~ss lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but
ll\alntain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the all-important con
cept of cultural mediation. These arts were in play in every room at the ex
::ordinary Pittsburgh conference on literacy. I learned a lot about them
re, and I am thankful.

I ~----------------------------------------------------------------For an introduction in English to these and other aspects of Guaman Poma's work,
ROlena Adorno. Adorno and Mercedes Lopez-Baralt pioneered the study of Andean
I~olic systems in Guaman Poma.
It is far from clear that the Royal Commentaries was as benign as the Spanish seemed
assume. The book certainly played a role in maintaining the identity and aspirations

Contact Zone

530
of indigenous elites in the Andes. In the mid-eighteenth century, a new editio
Royal Commentaries was suppressed by Spanish authorities because its preface n of
a prophecy by Sir Walter Raleigh that the English would invade Peru and
Inca monarchy.
' The discussion of community here is summarized from my essay
Utopias. "
For information about this program and the contents of courses taught in it
Program in Cultures, Ideas, Values (CIV), Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA 94305.
'
WORKS CITED

Adorno, Rolena. Guaman Poma de Ayala: Writing and Resistance in Colonial

Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined CV111munines: Reflections on the Origins and
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1984.
Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca. Royal Commentaries of the Incas. 1613. Austin:
Texas P, 1966.
Guaman Porn a de Ayala, Felipe. EI primer nueva cor6nica y buen gobierno.
Ed. John Murra and Rolena Adorno. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1980.
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Linguistic Utopias." The Linguistics of Writing. Ed. Niger
et al. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987. 48-66.
Trevif\o, Gloria. "Cultural Ambivalence in Early Chicano Prose Fiction." Diss.
ford U, 1985.

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING

1. Perhaps the most interesting question"Arts of the Contact Zone"

for its readers is how to put together the pieces: the examples from
children, the discussion of Guaman Poma and the New Chronicle and
Government, the brief history of European literacy, and the
curriculum reform at Stanford. The terms that run through the
are, among others, these: "contact," "community," "a
" transculturation." As you reread, mark those passages you might
trace the general argument that cuts across these examples.

2. This essay was originally delivered as a lecture. Before you read her
again, create a set of notes on what you remember as important,
or worthwhile. Imagine yourself as part of her audience. Then
essay. Where would you want to interrupt her? What questions
ask her that might make"Arts of the Contact Zone" more access 1" "
you?
3. This is an essay about reading and writing and teaching and
about the " literate arts" and the "pedagogical arts" of the contact
Surely the composition class, the first-year college English class,
imagined as a contact zone. And it seems in the spirit of Pratt's
identify (as a student) with Guaman Poma. As you reread, think
how and where this essay might be said to speak directly to yOU
your education as a reader and writer in a contact zone.

531

There are some difficult terms in this essaY:."autochthonous," "autoethnog

raphy," "transculturation." The last two are defined in the text; the first you
will have to look up. (We did.) In some ways, the slipperiest of the key
words in the essay is "culture." At one point Pratt says,
If one thinks of cultures, or literatures, as discrete, coherently struc

tured, monolingual edifices, Guaman Poma 's text, and indeed any

autoethnographic work, appears anomalous or chaotic-as it apparently

did to the European scholars Pietschmann spoke to in 1912. If one does

not think of cultures this way, then Guaman Poma's text is simply het

erogeneous, as the Andean region was itself and remains toda y. Such a

text is heterogeneous on the reception end as well as the production

end: it will read very differently to people in different positions in the

contact zone. (p. 524)

If one thinks of cultures as "coherently structured, monolingual edifices,"

the text appears one way; if one thinks otherwise the text is "simply het
erogeneous." What might it mean to make this shift in the way one thinks
of culture? Can you do it-that is, can you read the New Chronicle from
both points of view, make the two points of view work in your own imag
ining? Can you, for example, think of a group that you participate in as a
"community"? Then can you think of it as a "contact zone"? Which one
seems "natural" to you? What does Pratt assume to be the dominant point
of view now, for her readers?
As you reread, not only do you want to get a sense of how to explain
these two attitudes toward culture, but you need to practice shifting your
point of view from one to the other. Think, from inside the position of
each, of the things you would be expected to say about Poma's text,
Manuel's invention, and your classroom.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

Here, briefly, are two descriptions of the writing one might find or ex
pect in the "contact zone." They serve as an introduction to the three writ
ing assignments.
Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingual

ism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular

expression-these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Mis

COmprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces,

absolute heterogeneity of meaning-these are some of the perils of

writing in the contact zone. They all live among us today in the

transnationalized metropolis of the United States and are becoming

more Widely visible, more pressing, and, like Guaman Poma's text,

more deCipherable to those who once would have ignored them in de

fense of a stable, centered sense of knowledge and reality. (pp. 524-25)

We are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will

include, we are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with

the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in

transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, par

Ody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite

and vernacular cultural forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for

533

532
people to engage with suppressed aspects of history (including their
own histories), ways to move into and out of rhetorics of authenticity;
ground rules for communication across lines of difference and hierar
chy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect; a system
atic approach to the all-important concept of cultural mediation. (p. 529)

1. One way of working with Pratt's essay, of extending its project, would
to conduct your own local inventory of writing from the contact
You might do this on your own or in teams with others from your
You will want to gather several similar documents, your "
before you make your final selection. Think about how to make
choice. What makes one document stand out as representative? Here
two ways you might organize your search:
a. You could look for historical documents. A local historical
might have documents written by Native Americans ("Indians") to
white settlers. There may be documents written by slaves to masters
to northern whites explaining their experience with slavery. There
be documents by women (like suffragettes) trying to negotiate for
lic positions and rights. There may be documents from any of a
of racial or ethnic groups-Hispanic, Jewish, Irish, Italian,
Swedish-trying to explain their positions to the mainstream
There may, perhaps at union halls, be documents written by workers
owners. Your own sense of the heritage of your area should direct
search.
b. Or you could look for contemporary documents in the print that
around you, things that you might otherwise overlook. Pratt refers
one of the characteristic genres of the Hispanic community, the
mania." You could look at the writing of any marginalized group,
ticularly writing intended, at least in part, to represent the experi
of outsiders to the dominant culture (or to be in dialogue with that
ture or to respond to that culture). These documents, if we
Pratt's example, would encompass the work of young children or
dents, including college students.
Once you have completed your inventory, choose a document you
like to work with and present it carefully and in detail (perhaps in
greater detail than Pratt's presentation of the New Chronicle). You
imagine that you are presenting this to someone who would not
seen it and would not know how to read it, at least not as an example
the literate arts of the contact zone.
2. Another way of extending the project of Pratt's essay would be to
your own autoethnography. It should not be too hard to locate a
context in which you are the "other"-the one who speaks from
rather than inside the dominant discourse. Pratt says that the pocitiOll'I
the outsider is marked not only by differences of language and
thinking and speaking but also by differences in power, authority, d
In a sense, she argues, the only way those in power can understan
is in their terms. These are terms you will need to use to tell your
your goal is to describe your pOSition in ways that "engage

representations others have made of [you]" without giving in or giving up

or disappearing in their already formed sense of who you are.
This is an interesting challenge. One of the things that will make the
writing difficult is that the autoethnographic or transcultural text calls upon
skills not usually valued in American classrooms: bilingualism, parody,
denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression, storytelling, W1
seemly comparisons of high and low cultural forms-these are some of the
terms Pratt offers. These do not fit easily with the h-aditional genres of the
writing class (essay, term paper, sun1ffiary, report) or its traditional values
(unity, consistency, sincerity, clarity, correctness, decorum).
You will probably need to take this essay (or whatever it should be
called) through several drafts. It might be best to begin as Pratt's student,
using her description as a preliminary guide. Once you get a sense of
your own project, you may find that you have terms or examples to add
to her list of the literate arts of the contact zone.
Citing Benedict Anderson and what he calls "imagined communities,"
Pratt argues that our idea of commw1ity is "strongly utopian, embodying
values like equality, fraternity, liberty, which the societies often profess
but systematically fail to realize." Against this utopian vision of commu
nity, Pratt argues that we need to develop ways of understanding (even
noticing) social and intellectual spaces that are not homogeneous, unified;
we need to develop ways of understanding and valuing difference.
Think of a commw1ity of which you are a member, a commw1ity that
is important to you. And think about the utopian terms yo u are given to
name and describe this community. Think, then, about this group in
Pratt's terms-as a "contact zone." How would you name and describe
this social space? Write an essay in which you present these alternate
points of view on a single social group. You will need to present this dis
cussion fully, so that someone who is not part of your group can follow
what you say, and you should take time to think about the consequences
(for you, for your group) of this shift in point of view, in terms.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Citing Benedict Anderson and what he refers to as "imagined commu

nities," Pratt argues that our idea of community is "strongly utopian,
embodying values like equality, fraternity, liberty, which the societies
o.ften profess but systematically fail to realize." Against this utopian vi
SIon of community, Pratt argues that we need to develop ways of un
derstanding (noticing or creating) social and intellectual spaces that are
not homogeneous or unified-contact zones; she argues that we need to
?evelop ways of understanding and valuing difference. Renato Rosaldo
In "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage" (p. 588) describes in detail a mo
ment when he " repositions" himself in relation to the Ilongot head
hunters and the practice of headhunting. As you reread this account,
read it through the lens of Pratt's"Arts of the Contact Zone." (This is
not a stretch. In the dedication, Rosaldo writes: "As a life partner and

534
intellectual companion, Mary Louise Pratt has inspired much of
thought and feeling that informs this book.")
Pratt creates a catalog of the "literate arts of the contact zone."
aldo is writing to and for a community that is close to him. He is not
ing "in the contact zone," as Pratt describes it. (Would you agree?)
you argue, however, that the story he tells represents the development
the imaginative or conceptual or ethical "arts of the contact Zone"?
is going on here? Rosaldo "repositions" himself and discovers somern ....
important about himself, about cultural differences, and about the
ods of his profeSSion, anthropology. Write an essay in which you
Rosaldo's story within the terms and arguments of Pratt's "Arts of
Contact Zone." Your goal should be to work with each essay as part
this project; your ultimate goal, however, should be to make an argumeil
about how we are pOSitioned (and how we might reposition
the worlds we inhabit with difficulty, worlds where people who are
nificantly different come into contact with each other on a regular

ADRIENNE

RICH

2. Here, from "Arts of the Contact Zone", is Mary Louise Pratt on

"autoethnographic" text:
Guaman Poma's New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed
to call an autoethnographic text, by which I mean a tex t in which people un
dertake to describe themselves in ways tha t engage wi th representations
others have made of them. Thus if ethnographic texts are those in which
European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usu
ally their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations
that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those
tex ts.... [TJhey involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of
idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are merged or infiltrated to
varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations
intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding .... Such
tex ts often constitute a marginalized group's point of entry into the domi
nant circuits of print culture. It is interesting to think, for example, of Amer
ican slave autobiography in its autoethnographic dimensions, which in
some respects distinguish it from Euramerican autobiographical tradition.
(pp.519-20)

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an example of

American slave autobiography. James Baldwin's "Stranger in the
(p. 93), John Edgar Wideman's "Our Time" (p. 689), and the excerpts
.
Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La jrontera (p. 64) could serve as
century counterparts. Choose one of these selections and reread It
"Arts of the Contact Zone" in mind. Write an essay that presents
selection as an example of autoethnographic and / or transcultural
You should imagine that you are working to put Pratt's ideas to the
(do they do what she says such texts must do?), but also add wh~t
have to say concerning this text as a literate effort to be present ill
context of difference.

ADRIENNE RICH (b. 1929) once said that whatever she

knows, she wants to "know it in [her] own nerves." As a
writer, Rich found it necessary to acknowledge her anger
at both the oppression of women and her immediate experi
ence of that oppression. She needed to find the "anger that
is creative." "Until I could tap into the very rich ocean,"
she said, "I think that my work was constrained in certain
ways. There's this fear of anger in women, which is partly
because we've been told it was always destructive, it was
always unseemly, and unwomanly, and monstrous."
Rich's poetry combines passion and anger with a "yen for order." She wrote
book of poems, A Change of World, while an undergraduate at Radcliffe
The book won the 1951 Yale Younger Poets Award and a generous intro
W. H. Auden, who was one of the judges. In 1991 she won the Com
Award in Literature and in 1992 the Robert Frost Medal from the
SOCiety of America for a lifetime of achievement in literature. Her other
which include The Diamond Cutters (1955), Snapshots of a Daughter
(1963, 1967), Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), The Will to
(1970), and Diving into the Wreck (1973), show an increasing concern

Political and psychological consequences of life in patriarchal society. When