Writing 121: Rhetorical Analysis, Mary Louise Pratt "Art of the Contact Zones"

What the instructor wants

Follow the instructions that you will find listed under "Guidelines for Writing a Rhetorical Analysis" subheading in the Writing a Rhetorical Analysis Paper: Guidelines and an Example section of Bean's "Chapter 4: Questioning a Text" (p 92-97) and compose a rhetorical analysis of Pratt's essay "The Arts of the Contact Zone."

NOTE: Remember this assignment is an analysis that is "the written counterpart of rhetorical reading." It has " a two-fold purpose: (1) articulating your own insights about how a text seeks to influence its readers, and (2) communicating those critical insights to other readers." (Bean 92) It is NOT a summary of Pratt's argument or a review of your opinions about the content of her argument. It is a written analysis featuring the listening and questioning strategies you have been learning to read both Rodriguez and Pratt's essays.

My problem - I think I almost understand the concept but am struggling because what I was taught 10 years ago is nothing like the writing style of today. We are also supposed to be submitting this for review for a workshop, but no one in my group is posting feedback. I was hoping to get some feedback on my analysis, but can't get to the tutoring center before it's due on Tuesday. Any help would be appreciated. Warning - it is a rough draft and not well cited at the moment. Grammar is not my strongest suit and I focused on the ideology aspect for my analysis.

Mary Louise Pratt, Stanford college professor spoke on the “Arts of the Contact Zones” in 1990 to like-minded professors in an effort to change or reform the teaching of multi-cultural literacy. Approaching the idea of cultural literacy from an ideological standpoint, she sought to criticize the traditional approach to teaching and embrace what she calls “contact zones.”

Placing a high value on perspective, both from students and teachers alike, Pratt provides both anecdotal and historical evidence to why perspective needs to be give consideration. Opening with a story about her son, she sets the tone for delivering literacy not through education but through perspective. In the beginning it is in relation to something her son was passionate about, baseball cards. Baseball cards brought forth a perspective her son could learn from and relate to through love of the game, and the art of collecting. She goes so far as to say that it is, “unforgivable that schooling itself gave him nothing as remotely meaningful to do, let alone anything that would actually take him beyond the referential, masculinist ethos of baseball and its lore.” In other words, her ideal education for her son would be to go beyond the basics and help to teach him understanding.

She uses her sons story as a kind of layman start to the introduction of the main character of her narrative Fillepe Gauman Poma. Gauman Poma, as the star of the speech provides and long and extensive analogy to her point that perspective can change our understanding of culture. She demonstrates that the traditional approach of teaching the “right” perspective from an authoritative stance can leave gaping holes in our ability to see the whole picture. A long time ago in a land far away, Gauman Poma wrote a letter as an Andean citizen to his Spanish King. An extensive text of over 800 pages and 400 illustrations, Poma sought to describe life from the perspective of an Andean. He provided information, insights and knowledge about the life of an Andean citizen to his king in a way his King could understand. He transposed his culture, with the culture Spain had assigned them and sought to open the minds of those across the seas. Sadly, when Poma sent off his big book of information, his culture had been deemed illiterate in the minds of academia and his stories were lost to annals of time.

Pratt argues, that if the receivers had examined the text and sought to learn from it, they would have garnered a better understanding of what life was like for the Andean subjects. However, this text did not fit within the existing understanding of Andean culture and was almost lost for it. Instead another text, written by a Spanish, Andean citizen living in Spain colored the perspective in a Spanish positive light and was understood to be the right perspective. Written in standard Spanish without illustration The Royal Commentaries of the Incas by Garcilaso de la Vega, was and up to Pratts speech considered to be the correct narrative for understating the Incan culture. This example being almost the exact definition of positivist reading in lieu of interpretive understanding. Ideally, Pratt would have this example shock us into understanding that by ignoring multiple perspectives in favor of the right perspective, we could be missing out on a bigger picture. Once she has painted this picture of altered reality through multiple perspectives, she demonstrates the concept of “contact zones” in education, versus correct understandings.

Her speech full of analogies launches almost immediately into another one at the beginning of the section headlined as “Contact and Community.” She describes the common interpretation of speech communities as being similar to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.” The speech communities she describes are communities which approach literacy fro the same background, understanding and narrative. Having this same perspective and same grammar allows an educator to guide these communities to the right understanding of culture. This design doesn’t allow for discourse and this is a problem which has become more pervasive over time. Using her son again, she describes an assignment he turned in. Ideally this assignment would cause an engaged educator to create both a teaching moment, and a conversation is merely praised for being complete.

Completing this long set up, Pratt finished up by delivering a short summary detailing her experience with engaging in multiple perspectives through a “contact zone” in education. She describes it as hard, almost raw, a place where “No one was excluded and no one was safe.” (497) She detailed a experience where all participants got to “seeing a world described with him or her in it. Along with the rage, incomprehension and pain.” In other words everyone was confronted with who they and their histories were from the other perspectives. She describes this as so draining that those involved in the course came to appreciate the safe spaces of traditional education. One where there was a unifying monologue from an authority. Through all of the negative though, she does describe wonder and exhilaration. She describes this as the most exciting teaching they had ever done. Ultimately she concludes that engaging in several points of view is hard, but ultimately worth it for a broader understanding of cultural literacy, and that the end game will be to figure out how to make it the “best learning available.” (497)