James Elmborg
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The “contact zone” has emerged as an important concept for conceptualizing cultural difference in educational institutions. This article explores the usefulness of the contact zone as a guiding principle for academic librarianship. It suggests that by using contact-zone theory, librarians can develop a more reflective educational practice. Contact-zone theory is described and its implications for librarianship are explored.
In 1991, Mary Louise Pratt addressed the Modern Language Association annual conference. In her presentation, she used the phrase “contact zone” to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”1 Pratt argued that education is negotiated in contact zones where students of diverse backgrounds learn to communicate with each other and with their teachers. By focusing on transmitting academic content, faculty often miss this fact, which means they often misread or ignore important dynamics in their classrooms. Pratt argued that students devise a multitude of strategies to deal with the contact zone. The effectiveness of the strategies they choose has much to do with their ultimate success in classes and in the larger cultural space of the institution. Students must resolve their own unique backgrounds, especially their language practices, with classrooms that demand standard academic English. Pratt described the creative approaches students must develop to negotiate this conflict as the “arts of the contact zone.”
In the not-so-distant past, college students were a homogeneous group–white, male, and financially well-to-do. Today’s campus, by contrast, is marked by increasing diversity in age, gender, ethnicity, and economic background. To be successful in this diverse environment, college students have to find ways to communicate successfully across cultural and linguistic boundaries, and it is in response to the ensuing challenges that they develop Pratt’s arts of the contact zone. Many of these challenges will be posed by professors, who are powerful authority figures in students’ lives, but others will be posed by their classmates and friends. Change is implicit in the educational process, and challenges can be important to encourage growth, but many students find that developing the kind of academic identity that colleges encourage undermines the identity that binds them to family and culture. This conflict between loyalty to the past and hope for the future that a college education can provide generates complex responses that give rise to the arts of the contact zone.
College is a time when many people encounter true difference for the first time. They have learned to deal with their families, towns, and neighborhoods. As their sphere of experience necessarily widens in the university, their education involves exposure to increasing levels of difference. This process is by design and is generally healthy, but difference also generates conflict, and learning to negotiate conflict in productive ways is key to learning in the contact zone.A contact zone can become problematic when a student’s cultural identity comes into conflict with the diverse culture of the academy, causing the academic performance of that student to suffer. As the academic library navigates its way through the many changes currently underway, theories of the contact zone can be used to create a more student-centered institution, one that acknowledges student difference, facilitates learning, and thereby provides a valuable service to the academic community. Two things will be presented in this discussion of the contact zone. First of all, the various ways the idea of the contact zone has shaped discourse in composition scholarship will be surveyed. Secondly, the ways that contact-zone theory might give shape to the practices of academic libraries and librarianship will be explored.
Pratt’s Theory and Its Impact
Pratt wove two narratives into her discussion of the contact zone. In the first narrative, she told the story of Guaman Poma, an indigenous Andean who addressed a huge correspondence (twelve hundred pages) to the king of Spain in 1613. In this missive, Poma uses the Spanish language (the Incas had no written language) to articulate a vision of the Incan world and how the Spanish monarch might rule that world in benevolent, culturally respectful ways. In her second narrative, Pratt told the story of her fifth-grade son and his growth toward literacy through baseball-trading cards and writing assignments in the standard public-school classroom. The two stories share themes important to Pratt’s development of the contact zone as a defining principle for the educational process.
Poma’s letter to the king of Spain proposes a new model of government for the management of the Incas. In the letter, Poma presumes to teach the king of Spain how to rule his empire. Pratt calls Poma’s text autoethnographic, which she defines as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.”2 In effect, the autoethnographic text is an effort to grapple with the description an outside culture has imposed on a less powerful one. At stake in this process is the ownership of culture and the right of the less powerful to define their culture for themselves. Pratt’s theory is tied to language. The Incas had no written language. Poma had to “construct his text by appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders,” the Spanish. Pratt calls this appropriation “transculturation,” which she defines as “processes whereby members of subordinated or marginalized groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture”3 Poma’s “letter” was never delivered to the king of Spain, and for Pratt, such dead letters–efforts to communicate that fail to reach an audience–represent a common problem of those who attempt to articulate identity in the contact zone.
Pratt also describes her own son’s experience in the educational system. This obviously bright young student is not the subject of a controlling monarch, but is instead a student in an elementary school. Nonetheless, Pratt sees her son employing many of the same linguistic strategies as Poma in his efforts to negotiate the contact zone of the classroom. In response to his teacher’s assignments, he invents responses that “parody, resist, and critique the imagined classroom community”4 In this way, he attempts to engage the teacher’s representation of him, and he attempts to use the language he is being taught while still retaining control over his own ideas and identity. In other words, as he negotiates his identity in the context of the classroom, he practices the same autoethnographic and transculturalistic strategies as Poma. These negotiations typify students’ responses to the contact zone at all academic levels.
Pratt concludes by noting that “community,” which has become a feel-good mantra within educational circles, is, in fact, more problematic than many thinkers in the academy will acknowledge. Pratt calls these academic constructions of community “utopian,” in that they hypothesize a world based on “equality, freedom, and liberty” without recognizing that the academy is not equal, free, or liberating for many students.5 This problem can be particularly acute for students attempting to negotiate simultaneous membership in two communities that resist assimilation into one cultural identity. Bruffee suggests that when students enter college, they must learn the discourses of academia. Because students already have one community-based discourse (from home), Bruffee refers to this as a process of “reacculturation.”6 Gee notes that this process of acculturation is more difficult for students who are not from middle-class homes, because academic discourse reflects language practices of the middle class.7 Bartholomae suggests that a college student must “build bridges between his point of view and his readers.”8 For students to write for a professor of English means they have to write the way an English professor writes, or at least “to offer up some approximation of that discourse.”9 These theorists agree that mastering academic discourse relates directly to academic success. As Pratt notes, academic communities are based on the assumption that “whatever conflicts or systematic social differences might be in play, it is assumed that all participants are engaged in the same game and that the game is the same for all players.”10 In fact, the game is not the same for all students. In the modern multiversity (as Kerr described it) many students compensate with arts of the contact zone as they negotiate their identities in class and in the social world that surrounds them.11 These arts include, of course, transcultural and autoethnographic strategies–efforts by students to use language to define themselves rather than letting others define them. They also include an abundance of other strategies–”critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, [and] vernacular expression,” strategies that reflect varying degrees of resistance as practiced by the individual student to the idealized academic community he or she wants to join.12
The concept of the contact zone has been creative and energetic since the origination of the term. Miller has questioned Pratt’s idealistic belief that contact zones can be negotiated in safe houses. For Miller, classrooms by definition bring discordant values and voices into conflict in ways that resist resolution.13 Researchers have refined their perspectives on the ways that students from diverse backgrounds experience the contact zone as a reality of the college experience.14 Writing centers, where peer tutors work with other students on their writing, create a special kind of contact zone where students work with each other’s unpolished writing.15 The electronic interface to a Web site or online learning environment has been explored as a virtual contact zone.16 Theorists have explored the ways academic disciplines negotiate their identities with each other as an example of the contact zone.17 Bizzell has gone so far as to argue that the contact zone should not only change the practice of composition instruction, it should also transform the teaching of literature.18 Contact-zone theory taps into deeply held beliefs about the rights of students to hold their own languages and identities as they learn in school. It has become so significant for composition studies that at least one writer has described it as “Composition’s Content in the University.”19 Indeed, when broadly interpreted, contact-zone theory applies to any situation where cultural difference (based on gender, ethnicity, geography, disciplinary practice, religion–the list goes on and on) might alienate a student from higher education.
A Larger Theoretical Context
Contact-zone theory is derived at least in part from the work of social language theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work explores patterns of discourse in novels. He developed a way of understanding these books as either “monologic” or “dialogic.” Novels dominated by the narrator’s voice are monologic. In the monologic novel, all characters in the novel are subordinate to rules established by the dominant voice of the narrator. Novels that incorporate a multiplicity of voices, each one important to the collective community in the novel, are dialogic or “polyphonic.”20 In Bakhtin’s scheme, novels mirror human culture, in which people use language to establish power and control dangerous social disruptions. According to Bakhtin, human situations are ritualized into “speech genres.” These genres arise in the course of human interaction when a certain event or situation becomes governed by understood rules and conventions. These speech genres encode issues of class and are a key means by which conflict and difference are controlled.21 They can become stiflingly formal if they become associated with moral judgment or social superiority, or they can be flexible and open-ended if such moral and social judgments are lessened. Following Bakhtin, educational theorists argue that monologic classrooms, where one dominant voice and style of speaking is authorized while others are controlled, create an educational system that eradicates individuality and institutionalizes the status quo.22 Bakhtin’s theories imply a preference for art and life as dialogic and polyphonic. By embracing many voices and the worldview they imply, Bakhtin’s thinking has been held up by language theorists as a democratic model for art and culture.
Further complicating the question of voice and identity is the influence of educational theorist Lev Vygotsky, whose research explores the connection between language, identity, and the thinking process. Vygotsky argues that from a very young age, language and thought are intertwined in human processes of growth. As young people learn language, he reasons, they learn a voice that develops into a thinking process. When the voice they use to speak aloud becomes internalized (and silent), it develops into thinking. For Vygotsky, thinking emerges from the social process of language acquisition: “intellectual growth is contingent on … mastering the social means of thought, that is, language.”23 The increasingly sophisticated use of language enables increasingly sophisticated thinking. Put quite simply, thinking is much like talking to yourself, which you learn by talking to others. Vygotsky hypothesized that students continue to acquire language and thinking ability by engaging in increasingly sophisticated language and thinking, and he suggested that they learn in a “zone of proximal development” characterized by their ability to discourse at higher levels when in the company of higher performing teachers and peers.24 The zone in Pratt’s contact zone clearly echoes Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.