Wednesday, January 21, 2009

What is the summary for "Arts of the Contact Zone" by Mary Louise Pratt?

Margarete Abshire

Pratts contact zone is the place where two or more cultures come into contact.
Pratt is speaking about literacy, so her interest is in how reading and writing can mediate or
define these contact zones. She gives two examples. First, she discusses her sons love of
baseball cards and how his newly-learned ability to decode words led to a growing understanding
not only of baseball, but of all the ancillary disciplines that connect to it: statistics, labor
relations, history, architecture, and even the very idea of expertise. Her sons understanding of
these subjects was unlocked by his growing literacy; his ability to follow his own interests
mediated his understanding of the baseball. 

The second example is Felipe
Guzman Poma de Ayalas seventeenth-century text The New Chronicle, an account from an Andean
point of view of the Spanish conquest and subsequent governance of Peru. Written in Quechua and
Spanish, Pratt sees this text as another kind of...

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