[Warning long post: reflective brainstorming] Hello readers! I have found your work on Pratt helpful, thanks. I want to echo those who have been writing in agreement that we are brainstorming on the list, thinking things through together, as it were. I for one will not violate the contemplative tone and thoughtful manner of these discussion. In every case, I would prefer if those manners could/would continue safely for all. For my part, I have been able to rethink my earlier posts in light of your discussions, thanks. At this point, note please the tentative and reflective preface, _at this point_, I am inclined to agree with those who call for caution. In doing so I am going to talk here in general rather than the particular so as to stay with issues rather than persons. Ok? When I asked if organizing a reading course around the notion of the contact zone I was thinking about 1) including historical texts where reading was argued over as a contested site that the victors (colonial, imperial, cultural) won the control of reading habits. It seems to me that who gets to say what reading is is the one who controls meaning making in historical struggles. My research in my bibliography of narratives that depict readers reading lists many where reading is depicted as a site of political struggle. Also, 2) I was thinking about the space between the reader and the page as a contact zone. Here it is my heavy interest in semiotics I raise as a site of struggle in which the reader is constructed as a subject or subjects or since you may prefer the reader constructs a heterogeneity of resistances. Now, I am no longer thinking that Pratt's notion of a contact zone suffices (or serves us or serves others) if I deflate it to represent historical struggle over what I call the semiotic or what may traffic here well enough to call the reader. I would agree with those who would withhold the term CZ for those distinct colonial and imperial, historical and geographic "zones" or areas of cultural conflict that include or included slavery, genocide, legalized assault, etc. I would not call for example the comp classroom a contact zone, unless those contemporary historically disenfranchised "zoners" were present. Even then, like Pratt, I would call that classroom Contact-Zone-like. I would prefer to maintain the historical cultural specificity of the term: CZ. I am not saying that my image of community is romantic, homogenous, etc. I am thinking instead that I need terms I do not have to represent what I find represented in the narratives that depict reading per se, but I am not going to traffic in the deflation of the term CZ to represent all similar or lesser or like events, such as my comp. classroom. I do not think that I would avoid the knowledge. I have found some few autoethnographic narratives that depict readers reading in historically concrete, geographically specific contact zones. But I am going to seek elsewhere for a vocabulary to represent the semiotic struggle over reading as the right to make meanings. For one example (may I go on?), I would characterize the Italian humanist Renaissance as one important moment historically where reading was a specific site of struggle between say Catholic and University or Noble cultures. But I would distinguish those struggles from the struggles occurring elsewhere even perhaps at the same time in contact zones. I would think the vocabulary of the arts of the contact zone would shed light on the arts of the humanist rennaisance. I am thinking of those parodies of Church figures reading the bible to the peasants, for example: Pope as an ass reading to the Bishop as a fox and the monks as apes, for the popular account. But, even though the church murdered, burnt, and slaughtered its enemies during the purge of humnaist heretics (among others), I would restrain from designating the historical moment as a contact zone. I would call the European invasion of this continent during the 1600s a CZ. I know the terms will remain fuzzy, but perhaps that is only best. For example, I would not call the current spacial anxiety called Postmodernism a CZ, even though that cultural conflict is characterized by a nostalgia for classicism (as if in response to that spacial anxiety about cyberspace, the hubble, chaos theory, etc). I confess I am alarmed also by the emptying of content from the term "colonial." So I think my research brings to light narratives from contact zones, and those narratives do illustrate that reading is one site of contestation in contact zones. But it does not logically follow or necessitate that I characterize all historic contestations about reading as events in contact zones. yet, my research makes clear to me that reading is a site of contestation. I seek terms with which to illustrate those conflicts, to characterize them. My collected narratives depict those conflicts in ways that I think will make for interesting and important ilustration for student readers, and the stories do inform me about reading in ways that even the most arcane French theorists have not for me. They also historicize reading by depicting it as enactment and containment in ways that would allow students to grasp and narrate those "abstractions" concretely. But, for my part, I think (now) I will locate CZ's specifically in imperialist and colonial moments and not in the general acts of reading. Hence, I would hope to avoid the emptying of the content of the terms: CZ and colonial, as well as to avoid perhaps mischaracterizing my classroom and terms like feminism(s), modernism, etc. I see many similarities between reading and the notion of a CZ but I also see differences beyond any ranking of aggressions or mimicries (sp?) and any hierarchy of subjections. Finally, my point is this: "What is it but shameful for me as a white male to say that my reading is a contact zone?" What is it but ultra-conservative for me located as I am to say that the act of reading in general is a contact zone? JMCF