First, I want to ask -- did you all get my post (rather lond, sorry) in
response to Jim?  it would have been last week.  if not, I can re-post, just
let me know.
 
Okay, Serena, at one point you raise the issue of conceiving of reading as a
contact zone as similar to Elbow's believing/doubting game or Scholes
surrenduring to the text idea.  I guess I need more clarification about thata.
For me a theory of contact zone reading is posited against both Elbow and
Scholes in that it is a resistant positioning of reader/s and text/s within a
larger social apparatus. For me, resistance is the key to surviving and
negotiating the contact zone (remember, this is one of the key elements of my
thesis, so if I get too involed, just pull on my figurative reins!) --
surrender and believing begin to equal compliance, non-action, appropriation
through lack of resistance.  It's easier for me to think about this in terms of
consumption in both of the senses that deCerteau describes in The Practice of
Everyday Life (I'll put copies in boxes today). In other words, consumption, in
the way that contemporary society conceives of it, is literally a two-edged
sword -- we consume an objec/subject/other in order to make it _like_ us
(become us) AND we consume an Object/subject/other in order to become like it
(become it) [Jim, keep me honest with this French theory, okay?!] -- so
consumption is both assimilation AND appropriation, sometimes simultaneously.
BUT, and this is where the contact zone comes into play, IF we conceive of
consumption in this way, then we can immediately begin to see the problems of
reading as a contact zone.  In the Zone, there are assymetrical power relations
between subject/object/others, so the act of reading/consuming, hinges on whose
reading whom -- whose being assimilated/appropriated by whom -- and at Miami,
our audience is primarily, again in Pratt's terms, a metropolitan one (in other
words, they are the white majority), so any foray into the contact zone must be
accompanied by an acknowledgement of the political.social power of the reader.
Cone naively, a contact zone reading pedagogy COULD become just another
colonial safari to gather and collect fragments of the OTHER (the peripheral in
Pratt's lingo).  Am I making sense here??
 
As for geography, think in purely material terms of geographical spaces like
the Southwest, the texas/mexico border region today and the "frontier" of the
18th and 19th century.  What was the east coast during the landings of the
1600's if not a literal contact zone?? IF you can abstract this space/geography
conception of the Zone and overlay it within a theoretical framework, then I
think the geography questions become more clear -- and more problematic.
 
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited about conceiving of a course that uses reading
as a contact zone -- I've just taken on the role of Chief Problematizer for the
moment.  I think this is a viable idea and will work with the other things that
we've talked about.
 
--malea