OK, with the quick disclaimer that I'm brain dead after two days of portfolio
scoring, I'm going to attempt to start addressing some of the questions Jim
raised in his post of several days ago.
 
Jim asks: "Does the term `contact zone' as a way to describe the cultural and
psychological impact of reading devalue in any way the important political
and cultural value of the concept?"
 
As I understand what Pratt is saying, I don't think so at all. Isn't reading
one of the "arts" of the contact zone? She wouldn't say that exactly.
Let me work through some thoughts that I don't know exactly where they are
 
 
If contact zones are "spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grappple 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 part
s of the world today" (Pratt, 34) doesn't each group "read" the other on many
levels? The difference here is that reading is not quite the same game we
talk about when we talk about discourse (reading and writing) being connected
to a community, a community where there are shared codes and rules for interpre
tation. In contact zones, such codes and rules, or rather practices, come
into contact with other codes and systems of interpretation, not with every
one on equal footing, as is implied in common images of community, but with
very unequal power relations.
 
OK. Here is something that gets closer to what I think Jim was asking:
In suggesting contact zones as a description for reading, would we be suggest-
ing that it can describe the individual reader's confrontation with a text?
Is reading a contact zone in this way? Yes, I suppose we can call reading a
text a "social space", and in a sense cultures are clashing and grappling
with each other (whether it's writer/reader culture or something else), but
I'm not sure what to do with the issues of asymetrical relations of power.
 
I suppose we could draw from Elbow's idea of the believing/doubting game, or
Robert Schole's notion of surrendering to the text, and use the idea of the
text overpowering a reader, but I'm not sure if I buy it. I'm always a little
reluctant to describe a reader as being subject to a text--but maybe there
is something here. What do you think?
 
Or maybe the power issue isn't necessarily to be applied so literaly to the
act of reading in the implementation of this description. Perhpas there are
more useful ways of developing contact zones as a description of reading.
 
Jim asks is the "loss of geography" in using the CZ metaphor is a problem.
I guess I'm not sure exactly what this might mean. How is geography lost?
In that seeing reading as a contact zone, we are talking about something that
can't inhabit space--except for the space of the page (or other medium)?
Do power relations need space--physical space?
 
Or am I not following that idea at all? How else might we use the concept of
contact zones to talk about reading?
 
Serena