ENGL 102 Northeastern University Arts of The Contact Zone Article Essay For this assignment you need to read Arts of the contact zone which is an article written by Mary Louise Pratt and then write a major essay(3-5 pages) according to the prompt.the prompt and the Pratt article are attached. Arts of the Contact Zone
By Mary Louise Pratt
From Ways of Reading, 5th edition,
ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky
(New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999)
Whenever the subject of literacy comes up, what often pops first into my mind is a conversation I
overheard eight years ago between my son Sam and his best friend, Willie, aged six and seven,
respectively: “Why dont you trade me Many Trails for Carl Yats . . . Yesits . . . Ya-strum-scrum.”
“Thats not how you say it, dummy, its Carl Yes . . . Yes . . . oh, I dont know.” Sam and Willie had
just discovered baseball cards. Many Trails was their decoding, with the help of first-grade
English phonics, of the name Manny Trillo. The name they were quite rightly stumped on was
Carl Yastremski. 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 decipher surnames on baseball
cards, and a lot about cities, states, heights, weights, places of birth, stages of life. In the years
that followed, I watched Sam apply his arithmetic skills to working out batting averages and
subtracting retirement years from rookie years; I watched him develop senses of patterning and
order by arranging and rearranging his cards for hours on end, and aesthetic judgment by
comparing different photos, different series, layouts, and color schemes. American geography
and history took shape in his mind through baseball cards. Much of his social life revolved around
trading them, and he learned about exchange, fairness, trust, the importance of processes as
opposed to results, what it means to get cheated, taken advantage of, even robbed. Baseball
cards were the medium of his economic life too. Nowhere better to learn the power and
arbitrariness of money, the absolute divorce between use value and exchange value, notions of
long- and short-term investment, the possibility of personal values that are independent of market
values.
Baseball cards meant baseball card shows, where there was much to be learned about adult
worlds as well. And baseball cards opened the door to baseball books, shelves and shelves of
encyclopedias, magazines, histories, biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons,
even poems. Sam learned the history of American racism and the struggle against it through
baseball; he saw the Depression and two world wars from behind home plate. He learned the
meaning of commodified labor, what it means for ones body and talents to be owned and
dispensed by another. He knows something about Japan, Taiwan, Cuba, and Central America
and how men and boys do things there. Through the history and experience of baseball stadiums
he thought about architecture, light, wind, topography, meteorology, the dynamics of public
space. He learned the meaning of expertise, of knowing about something well enough that you
can start a conversation with a stranger and feel sure of holding your own. Even with an adult-especially with an adult. Throughout his preadolescent years, baseball history was Sams
luminous point of contact with grown-ups, his lifeline to caring. And, of course, all this time he was
also playing baseball, Struggling his way through the stages of the local Little League system,
lucky enough to be a pretty good player, loving the game and coming to know deeply his
strengths and weaknesses.
Literacy began for Sam with the newly pronounceable names on the Picture cards and brought
him what has been easily the broadest, most varied, most enduring, and most integrated
experience of his thirteen-year life. Like many parents, I was delighted to see schooling give Sam
the tools with which to find and open all these doors. At the same time I found it unforgivable that
schooling itself gave him nothing remotely as meaningful to do, let alone anything that would
actually take him beyond the referential, masculinist ethos of baseball and its lore.
However, I was not invited here to speak as a parent, nor as an expert on literacy. I was asked to
speak as an MLA [Modern Language Association] member working in the elite academy. In that
capacity my contribution is undoubtedly supposed to be abstract, irrelevant, and anchored
outside the real world. I wouldn’t dream of disappointing anyone. I propose immediately to head
back several centuries to a text that has a few points in common with baseball cards and raises
thoughts about what Tony Sarmiento, in his comments to the conference, called new visions of
literacy. In 1908 a Peruvianist named Richard Pietschmann was exploring in the Danish Royal
Archive in Copenhagen and came across a manuscript. It was dated in the city of Cuzco in Peru,
in the year 1613, some forty years after the final fall of the Inca empire to the Spanish and signed
with an unmistakably Andean indigenous name: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Written in a
mixture of Quechua and ungrammatical, expressive Spanish, the manuscript was a letter
addressed by an unknown but apparently literate Andean to King Philip III of Spain. What stunned
Pietschmann was that the letter was twelve hundred pages long. There were almost eight
hundred pages of written text and four hundred of captioned line drawings. It was titled The First
New Chronicle and Good Government. No one knew (or knows) how the manuscript got to the
library in Copenhagen or how long it had been there. No one, it appeared, had ever bothered to
read it or figured out how. Quechua was not thought of as a written language in 1908, nor Andean
culture as a literate culture.
Pietschmann prepared a paper on his find, which he presented in London in 1912, a year after
the rediscovery of Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham. Reception, by an international congress of
Americanists, was apparently confused. It took twenty-five years for a facsimile edition of the
work to appear in Paris. It was not till the late 1970s, as positivist reading habits gave way to
interpretive studies and colonial elitisms to postcolonial pluralisms, that Western scholars found
ways of reading Guaman Poma s New Chronicle and Good Government as the extraordinary
intercultural tour de force that it was. The letter got there, only 350 years too late, a miracle and a
terrible tragedy.
I propose to say a few more words about this erstwhile unreadable text, in order to lay out some
thoughts about writing and literacy in what I like to call the contact zones. I use this 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. Eventually I will use the term to reconsider the
models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under
challenge today. But first a little more about Guaman Poma’s giant letter to Philip III.
Insofar as anything is known about him at all, Guaman Poma exemplified the sociocultural
complexities produced by conquest and empire. He was an indigenous Andean who claimed
noble Inca descent and who had adopted (at least in some sense) Christianity. He may have
worked in the Spanish colonial administration as an interpreter, scribe, or assistant to a Spanish
tax collector–as a mediator, in short. He says he learned to write from his half brother, a mestizo
whose Spanish father had given him access to religious education.
Guaman Poma’s letter to the king is written in two languages (Spanish and Quechua) and two
parts. The first is called the Nueva corónica, “New Chronicle.” The title is important. The chronicle
of course was the main writing apparatus through which the Spanish presented their American
conquests to themselves. It constituted one of the main official discourses. In writing a “new
chronicle,” Guaman Poma took over the official Spanish genre for his own ends. Those ends
were, roughly, to construct a new picture of the world, a picture of a Christian world with Andean
rather than European peoples at the center of it–Cuzco, not Jerusalem. In the New Chronicle
Guaman Poma begins by rewriting the Christian history of the world from Adam and Eve (Fig. 1
[p. 586]), incorporating the Amerindians into it as offspring of one of the sons of Noah. He
identifies five ages of Christian history that he links in parallel with the five ages of canonical
Andean history–separate but equal trajectories that diverge with Noah and reintersect not with
Columbus but with Saint Bartholomew, claimed to have preceded Columbus in the Americas. In a
couple of hundred pages, Guaman Poma constructs a veritable encyclopedia of Inca and preInca history, customs, laws, social forms, public offices, and dynastic leaders. The depictions
resemble European manners and customs description, but also reproduce the meticulous detail
with which knowledge in Inca society was stored on quipus and in the oral memories of elders.
Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed to call an
autoethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves
in ways that engage with representations others have made of them. Thus if ethnographic texts
are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually
their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others
construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts. Autoethnographic texts are not, then,
what are usually thought of as autochthonous forms of expression or self-representation (as the
Andean quipus were). Rather they 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. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to both metropolitan audiences and
the speakers own community. Their reception is thus highly indeterminate. Such texts often
constitute a marginalized groups point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture. It is
interesting to think, for example, of American slave autobiography in its autoethnographic
dimensions, which in some respects distinguish it from Euramerican autobiographical tradition.
The concept might help explain why some of the earliest published writing by Chicanas took the
form of folkloric manners and customs sketches written in English and published in Englishlanguage newspapers or folklore magazines (see Treviño). Autoethnographic representation
often involves concrete collaborations between people, as between literate ex-slaves and
abolitionist intellectuals, or between Guaman Poma and the Inca elders who were his informants.
Often, as in Guaman Poma, it involves more than one language. In recent decades
autoethnography, critique, and resistance have reconnected with writing in a contemporary
creation of the contact zone, the testimonio.
Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle ends with a revisionist account of the Spanish conquest, which,
he argues, should have been a peaceful encounter of equals with the potential for benefitting
both, but for the mindless greed of the Spanish. He parodies Spanish history. Following contact
with the Incas, he writes, “In all Castille, there was a great commotion. All day and at night in their
dreams the Spaniards were saying, ‘Yndias, yndias, oro, plata, oro, plata del Piru” (“Indies,
Indies, gold, silver, gold, silver from Peru”) (Fig. 2 [below]). The Spanish, he writes, brought
nothing of value to share with the Andeans, nothing “but armor and guns con la codicia de oro,
plata oro y plata, yndias, a las Yndias, Piru” (“with the lust for gold, silver, gold and silver, Indies,
the Indies, Peru”) (372). I quote these words as an example of a conquered subject using the
conquerors language to construct a parodic, oppositional representation of the conquerors own
speech. Guaman 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 surely recognize. Such are the
dynamics of language, writing, and representation in contact zones.
The second half of the epistle continues the critique. It is titled Buen gobierno y justicia, “Good
Government and Justice,” and combines a description of colonial society in the Andean region
with a passionate denunciation of Spanish exploitation and abuse. (These, at the time he was
writing, were decimating the population of the Andes at a genocidal rate. In fact, the potential loss
of the labor force became a main cause for reform of the system.) Guaman Poma’s most
implacable hostility is invoked by the clergy, followed by the dreaded corregidores, or colonial
overseers (Fig. 3 [below]). He also praises good works, Christian habits, and just men where he
finds them, and offers at length his views as to what constitutes “good government and justice.”
The Indies, he argues, should be administered through a collaboration of Inca and Spanish elites.
The epistle ends with an imaginary question-and-answer session in which, in a reversal of
hierarchy, the king is depicted asking Guaman Poma questions about how to reform the empire-a dialogue imagined across the many lines that divide the Andean scribe from the imperial
monarch, and in which the subordinated subject single-handedly gives himself authority in the
colonizers language 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
transculturation 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 conquest.
While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they
do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for.
Transculturation, like autoethnography, is a phenomenon of the contact zone.
As scholars have realized only relatively recently, the transcultural character of Guaman Poma’s
text is intricately apparent in its visual as well as its written component. The genre of the four
hundred line drawings is European–there seems to have been no tradition of representational
drawing among the Incas–but in their execution they deploy specifically Andean systems of
spatial symbolism that express Andean values and aspirations.1
In figure 1, for instance, Adam is depicted on the left-hand side below the sun, while Eve is on the
right-hand side below the moon, and slightly lower than Adam. The two are divided by the
diagonal of Adams digging stick. In Andean spatial symbolism, the diagonal descending from the
sun marks the basic line of power and authority dividing upper from lower, male from female,
dominant from subordinate. In figure 2, the Inca appears in the same position as Adam, with the
Spaniard opposite, and the two at the same height. In figure 3, depicting Spanish abuses of
power, the symbolic pattern is reversed. The Spaniard is in a high position indicating dominance,
but on the “wrong” (right-hand) side. The diagonals of his lance and that of the servant doing the
flogging mark out a line of illegitimate, though real, power. The Andean figures continue to occupy
the left-hand side of the picture, but clearly as victims. Guaman Poma wrote that the Spanish
conquest had produced “un mundo al reves,” “a world in reverse.”
In sum, Guaman Poma’s text is truly a product of the contact zone. If one thinks of cultures, or
literatures, as discrete, coherently structured, 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 heterogeneous, as the Andean region was itself and
remains today. 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. Because it deploys
European and Andean systems of meaning making, the letter necessarily means differently to
bilingual Spanish-Quechua speakers and to monolingual speakers in either language; the
drawings mean differently to monocultural readers, Spanish or Andean, and to bicultural readers
responding to the Andean symbolic structures embodied in European genres.
In the Andes in the early 1600s there existed a literate public with considerable intercultural
competence and degrees of bilingualism. Unfortunately, such a community did not exist in the
Spanish court with which Guaman Poma was trying to make contact. It is interesting to note that
in the same year Guaman Poma sent off his letter, a text by another Peruvian was adopted in
official circles in Spain as the canonical Christian mediation between the Spanish conquest and
Inca history. It was another huge encyclopedic work, titled the Royal Commentaries of the Incas,
written, tellingly, by a mestizo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Like the mestizo half brother who
taught Guaman Poma to read and write, Inca Garcilaso was the son of an Inca princess and a
Spanish official, and had lived in Spain since he was seventeen. Though he too spoke Quechua,
his book is written in eloquent, standard Spanish, without illustrations. While Guaman Poma’s
lifes work sat somewhere unread, the Royal Commentaries was edited and reedited in Spain and
the New World, a mediation that coded the Andean past and present in ways thought
unthreatening to colonial hierarchy.2 The textual hierarchy persists; the Royal Commentaries
today remains a staple item on Ph.D. reading lists in Spanish, while the New Chronicle and Good
Government, despite the ready availability of several fine editions, is not. However, though
Guaman Poma’s text did not reach its destination, the transcultural currents of expression it
exemplifies continued to evolve in the Andes, as they still do, less in writing than in storytelling,
ritual, song, dance-drama, painting and sculpture, dress, textile art, forms of governance,
religious belief, and many other vernacular art forms. All express the effects of long-term contact
and intractable, unequal conflict.
Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody,
denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression–these are some of the literate arts of
the contact zone. Miscomprehension, 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 defense of a stable, centered sense of knowledge
and reality.
Contact and Community
The idea of the contact zone is intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie
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