Arts of contact zone

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Arts of the Contact ZoneAuthor(s): Mary Louise PrattSource: Profession, (1991), pp. 33-40Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469 .

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Arts of the Contact ZoneMary LouisePratt

Whenever the subject of literacy comes up, what oftenpops first ntomymind isa conversation I overheardeightyearsago betweenmy sonSam and his bestfriend,Willie, aged sixand seven,respectively:Whydon'tyoutrade me Many Trails for Carl Yats . . .Yesits . . .Yastrum-scrum." "That's not how you say it, dummy, it'sCarl Yes... Yes.. .oh, I don't know." Sam and Williehad justdiscoveredbaseball cards.Many Trailswas theirdecoding,with thehelp offirst-gradenglishphonics,ofthenameManny Trillo.The name they ere quite rightlystumped on was Carl Yastremski. That was the first timeI rememberedseeingthemput theirincipient iteracy otheir own use, and Iwas of course thrilled.Sam andWillie learned lot about phonics thatyearby trying odecipher surnames n baseball cards,and alot about cities,states,heights,weights, places ofbirth,stages f life. n theyears, hatfollowed, Iwatched Samapplyhis arithmetic kills oworkingout batting veragesand subtracting retirement years from rookie years; Iwatched him develop sensesofpatterning nd orderbyarranging and rearranging his cards for hours on end, andaestheticjudgment ycomparing ifferentphotos,different series, layouts, and color schemes. American geographyandhistory ookshape inhismind through aseballcards.Much of his social life revolved around tradingthem, and he learned about exchange, fairness, trust, theimportance of processes as opposed to results, what itmeans to get cheated, taken advantage of, even robbed.

Baseball cards were themedium of his economic life too.Nowhere better to learn the power and arbitrariness ofmoney, the absolute divorce between use value andexchange value, notions of long- and short-term invest

ment, the possibility of personal values that are independent of market values.Baseball cards meant baseball card shows, where therewasmuch tobe learned bout adultworlds aswell.And

baseball cardsopened thedoor tobaseballbooks, shelvesand shelves of encyclopedias, magazines, histories, biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, evenpoems. Sam learned the history ofAmerican racism andthestrugglegainst tthrough aseball;he saw thedepression and two world wars from behind home plate. He

learned the meaning of cornmodified labor, hat itmeans forone's body and talents to beowned and dispensedbyanother.? He knows something aboutJapan, Taiwan, Cuba, and Central America and how men and

_ boys do things there.Throughthe history and experience ofbaseball stadiumshe thought bout architecture, ight,wind, topography, eteorology, thedynamicsofpublicspace.He learned themeaning of expertise, fknowingabout something well enough that you can start a conversationwith a strangernd feelsure fholdingyourown.Even with an adult?especially with an adult. Throughout his preadolescent years, baseball history was Sam'sluminous point of contact with grown-ups, his lifeline tocaring. And, of course, all this time he was also playingbaseball,strugglingisway through hestages f the ocalLittleLeague system, ucky nough tobe a pretty oodplayer, ovingthegame and coming toknowdeeplyhisstrengths and weaknesses.Literacybegan for amwith thenewlypronounceablenames on thepicture cards and broughthimwhat hasbeen easily the broadest, most varied, most enduring, andmost integratedxperience f his thirteen-yearife. ikemany parents, was delightedto see schoolinggive Samthe toolswith which tofindand open all these oors.Atthesametime found itunforgivablehatschooling tselfgavehimnothingremotelysmeaningfultodo, let loneanything hat ould actuallytakehim beyond the referential,masculinistethosofbaseball and its ore.

However, Iwas not invited here to speak as a parent,nor as an expert on literacy. Iwas asked to speak as anMLA member working in the elite academy. In thatcapacitymy contribution sundoubtedlysupposed tobeabstract, irrelevant, and anchored outside the real world. I

wouldn't dream of disappointing anyone. I proposeimmediately to head back several centuries to a text thathas a few points in common with baseball cards and raisesthoughts about what Tony Sarmiento, in his commentsto the conference, called new visions of literacy. In 1908 aPeruvianist named Richard Pietschmann was exploring intheDanish Royal Archive inCopenhagen and came

The author isProfessor ofSpanish and Comparative Literature andDirector of theProgram inModern Thought and Literature at Stanford University.This paper was presented as thekeynote ddress at theResponsibilities or Literacy conference nPittsburgh,Pennsylvania, inSeptember 1990.


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34 Arts of theContact Zone

across a manuscript. Itwas dated in the city of Cuzco inPeru, intheyear 1613, someforty ears fter he inalfallof the Inca empire to theSpanish and signedwith anunmistakably ndean indigenousname: FelipeGuamanPoma deAyala.Written inamixture ofQuechua andungrammatical, expressive Spanish, themanuscript was aletter ddressedby an unknown but apparently literateAndean toKing Philip III of Spain.What stunnedPietschmann was that the letterwas twelve hundred pageslong. here were almost eighthundredpages ofwrittentext nd fourhundredof captioned linedrawings.Itwastitled he First ew Chronicle nd Good Government. oone knew (or knows) how themanuscript got to thelibrarynCopenhagen orhow long ithad been there. oone, itappeared,had everbothered to read itorfiguredout how. Quechua was not thought of as awritten language in 1908, nor Andean culture as a literate culture.Pietschmannprepared a paper on his find,which hepresented nLondon in 1912, a yearafter herediscoveryofMachu Picchu byHiram Bingham.Reception, by aninternational congress of Americanists, was apparentlyconfused. t took twenty-fiveearsfor facsimile ditionof thework to appear, in Paris. Itwas not till the late1970s,aspositivist eading abitsgaveway to interpretivestudiesand colonial elitismstopostcolonial pluralisms,thatWestern scholarsfoundways of readingGuamanPomas New Chronicle and Good Governmentas theextraordinary intercultural tour de force that itwas. Theletter got there, only 350 years too late, a miracle and aterrible tragedy.

I propose to say a few more words about this erstwhileunreadable text, in order to lay out some thoughts aboutwritingand literacynwhat I liketocall thecontactones.I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures

meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts fhighlyasymmetricalrelations fpower, such ascolonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are livedout inmany partsof theworld today.Eventually Iwilluse the term to reconsider the models of community that

many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that areunder challenge today. But first a littlemore about Guaman Pomas giant letter oPhilip III.

Insofar as anything isknown about him at all, GuamanPoma exemplified the sociocultural complexities produced by conquest and empire. He was an indigenousAndean who claimed noble Inca descent and who hadadopted (at least in some sense)Christianity.He mayhaveworked intheSpanish colonial administrations aninterpreter, scribe, or assistant to a Spanish tax collector?as amediator, in short. He says he learned towrite from

his halfbrother,mestizowhose Spanishfather ad givenhim access to religious education.Guaman Pomas letter o theking iswritten intwolanguages (SpanishandQuechua) and twoparts. he first scalled theNueva coronica NewChronicle/ The title simportant. The chronicle of course was themain writingapparatus throughwhich theSpanish represented heirAmerican conquests to themselves. It constituted one ofthemain official discourses. Inwriting a "new chronicle,"Guaman Poma tookover the fficialSpanishgenrefor isown ends. Those ends were, roughly, to construct a newpictureof theworld, a pictureof aChristianworld withAndean rather than European peoples at the center ofit?Cuzco, not Jerusalem. In theNew Chronicle GuamanPoma begins by rewriting heChristian historyof theworld fromAdam and Eve (fig. 1), incorporatingtheAmerindians into itas offspring f one of the sons ofNoah. He identifies iveagesofChristianhistorythathelinks inparallelwith the fiveages of canonicalAndeanhistory?separate but equal trajectorieshatdivergewithNoah and reintersectotwithColumbus butwith SaintBartholomew, laimed tohaveprecededColumbus intheAmericas. In a couple ofhundredpages,Guaman Pomaconstructs a veritable encyclopedia of Inca and pre-Inca

EtPPiMERMWOO -WEVA

I--^-JFig. 1.Adam and Eve.


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Mary Louise Pratt 35

history, customs, laws, social forms, public offices, anddynastic eaders. he depictionsresembleEuropeanmanners and customs description, but also reproduce themeticulous detailwithwhich knowledge in Inca societywas stored on quipusznd in the oral memories of elders.Guaman PomasNew Chronicle s n instance fwhat Ihaveproposed tocall an autoethnographicext,bywhich Imean a text nwhich people undertaketodescribe themselves inways that engage with representations othershavemade of them. hus ifethnographic exts re thoseinwhich European metropolitan subjects represent tothemselves heir thers (usuallytheirconquered others),autoethnographic texts are representations that the sodefinedothers onstruct nresponseo r indialoguewiththose texts. Autoethnographic texts are not, then, whatare usually thought of as autochthonous forms of expression or self-representation (as theAndean quipus were).Rather they involvea selectivecollaborationwith andappropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. hese aremerged or infiltratedovarying egreeswith indigenous idioms to create self-representationsintended to intervene inmetropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to

Fig. 2. Conquista. Meeting of Spaniard and Inca. The Inca saysinQuechua, "You eat this gold?" Spaniard replies in Spanish,"We eat this gold."

both metropolitan audiences and the speakers own community.Their reception is thushighly indeterminate.Such texts ften onstitutemarginalizedgroupspointofentry into thedominant circuitsofprint culture. It isinteresting to think, for example, ofAmerican slave autobiography in itsautoethnographic imensions,which insome respects distinguish it from Euramerican autobiographicaltradition. he conceptmight help explainwhysomeof theearliestpublishedwriting byChicanas tookthe formof folkloricmanners and customs sketcheswritten inEnglish and published inEnglish-languagenewspapers or folkloremagazines (seeTreviiio). Autoethnographic representation often involves concretecollaborations between people, as between literate exslaves nd abolitionistintellectuals,r betweenGuamanPoma and the Inca elders who were his informants.Often, as inGuaman Poma, it involves more than onelanguage. In recent decades autoethnography, critique,and resistance have reconnected with writing in a contemporary creation of the contact zone, the testimonio.Guaman PomasNew Chronicle ndswith a revisionistaccount of the Spanish conquest, which, he argues,should have been a peacefulencounter f equalswith thepotentialforbenefiting oth, but forthemindless greedof theSpanish.He parodies Spanish history.Followingcontact with the Incas, he writes, "In all Castille, therewas a great commotion.All day and at night in theirdreams the Spaniards were saying 'Yndias, yndias, oro,plata, oro, platadel Piru'" ("Indies, Indies,gold, silver,gold, silver romPeru") (fig. ). The Spanish,hewrites,brought nothing of value to sharewith theAndeans,nothing "but armor and guns con la codicia de oro, plata,oroyplata, yndias,a lasYndias, Piru" ("withthe lustforgold, silver, old and silver, ndies, the Indies,Peru")(372). I quote thesewords as an exampleof a conqueredsubject using

the conquerors languageto construct a

parodic, oppositional representation of the conquerorsown speech.Guaman Pomamirrorsback to theSpanish(in their language,which is alien tohim) an imageofthemselvesthat they ften suppress andwill thereforesurely recognize. Such are the dynamics of language, writing, and representation in contact zones.The second halfof theepistle ontinuesthecritique. tis titled uen gobierno usticia 'GoodGovernment andJustice' nd combinesa descriptionofcolonial society ntheAndean regionwith a passionate denunciation ofSpanish exploitation and abuse. (These, at the timehewaswriting, ere decimatingthepopulationof the ^ndesat a genocidal rate. n fact,thepotential lossof the laborforce became a main cause for reform of the system.)Guaman Pomasmost implacablehostility s invokedby


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theclergy, ollowedby thedreaded corregidorestr colonial overseers(fig. ). He alsopraisesgoodworks,Christianhabits,and justmenwhere he findsthem, nd offersat length his views as towhat constitutes "good government and justice."The Indies, he argues, should beadministeredthrough collaboration f Inca and Spanishelites. he epistleendswith an imaginary uestion-andanswer session inwhich, in a reversal fhierarchy,theking isdepicted askingGuaman Poma questions abouthow to reform the empire?a dialogue imagined acrossthemany lines thatdivide theAndean scribe fromtheimperial onarch, and inwhich thesubordinatedsubjectsingle-handedly iveshimselfauthority n thecolonizerslanguage and verbal repertoire. In away, itworked?thisextraordinary extdid getwritten?but inaway itdidnot, for the letter never reached its addressee.To grasp the import fGuaman Pomas project, oneneeds tokeep inmind thatthe Incashad no system fwriting.Their huge empire issaid tobe theonlyknowninstanceof a full-blownbureaucratic statesocietybuiltand administered without writing. Guaman Poma constructs is textby appropriating nd adaptingpieces oftherepresentational epertoire f the invaders. e does

Fig. 3. Corregidor de minas. Catalog of Spanish abuses ofindigenous labor force.

not simply mitate r reproduce t;he selects nd adapts italongAndean lines to express (bilingually,mind you)Andean interests nd aspirations.Ethnographershaveused the term transculturation to describe processeswherebymembers of subordinatedormarginal groupsselectand invent rommaterials transmittedby a dominant or metropolitan culture. The term, originally coinedbyCuban sociologist ernandoOrtiz inthe1940s,aimedto replace overly reductive concepts of acculturation andassimilation used to characterize culture under conquest.While subordinatepeoples do not usually controlwhatemanates rom thedominant culture,they o determineto varying extents what gets absorbed into their own andwhat itgetsused for. ransculturation, ikeautoethnography, is a phenomenon of the contact zone.As scholarshave realizedonly relatively ecently, hetranscultural character of Guaman Pomas text is intricately pparent in its isual aswell as its rittencomponent.The genre of the fourhundred linedrawings isEuropean?there seems to have been no tradition of representational drawing among the Incas?but in their execution they eploy specificallyndean systemsf spatialsymbolism that express Andean values and aspirations.1In figure1,forinstance, dam isdepicted on the lefthand side below the sun,while Eve ison theright-handsidebelow themoon, and slighdy owerthanAdam. Thetwoaredivided by thediagonal ofAdams digging stick.InAndean spatial symbolism,thediagonal descendingfrom thesunmarks thebasic lineofpowerand authoritydividingupper from ower, ale fromfemale,dominantfrom subordinate. In figure , the Inca appears in thesameposition asAdam, with theSpaniardopposite, andthetwo at thesameheight. In figure, depictingSpanishabuses of power, the symbolicpattern is reversed. heSpaniard is ina highposition indicating ominance,buton the "wrong" (right-hand) ide.The diagonals ofhislanceand that f theservantdoing theflogging ark outa line of illegitimate, hough real,power.The Andeanfigures ontinue tooccupy the left-hand ide of thepicture, but clearly as victims. Guaman Poma wrote that theSpanish conquest had produced "unmundo al reves" aworld inreverse/

In sum, Guaman Pomas text is truly a product of thecontact zone. If one thinks of cultures, or literatures, as discrete, coherently structured, monolingual edifices, Guaman Pomas text, and indeed any autoethnographic work,appearsanomalousor chaotic?as itapparendy id to theEuropean scholars ietschmannspoke to in 1912. Ifonedoes not think f cultures hisway, then uaman Pomastext s simplyheterogeneous,as theAndean regionwasitselfnd remainstoday. uch a text sheterogeneous n


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the reception end aswell as the production end: itwill readvery ifferentlyopeople indifferentpositions nthecontact zone. Because itdeploys European and Andean systems of meaning making, the letter necessarily meansdifferentlyobilingualSpanish-Quechua speakers nd tomonolingual speakers ineither language; thedrawingsmean differently to monocultural readers, Spanish orAndean, and to bicultural readers responding to theAndean symbolic structures embodied inEuropean genres.In the ndes intheearly1600s there xisted literatepublic with considerable intercultural competence anddegrees of bilingualism. Unfortunately, such a communitydid not exist in theSpanish courtwithwhichGuaman Poma was trying tomake contact. It is interesting tonote that in the same year Guaman Poma sent off his letter, a text by another Peruvian was adopted in official circles in Spain as the canonical Christian mediationbetween theSpanish conquest and Inca history. twasanotherhuge encyclopedicwork, titled theRoyalCommentaries of the Incas, written, tellingly, by amestizo, IncaGarcilaso de laVega. Like themestizo halfbrotherwhotaught Guaman Poma to read and write, Inca Garcilasowas the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish official, andhad lived in Spain since he was seventeen. Though he toospoke Quechua, his book iswritten in eloquent, standardSpanish, without illustrations. While Guaman Poma'slife'swork sat somewhere unread, the Royal Commentarieswas edited and reedited nSpain and theNewWorld, a

mediation that coded the Andean past and present inways thought unthreatening to colonial hierarchy.2 Thetextual hierarchy persists: the Royal Commentaries todayremainsa staple itemon PhD reading lists nSpanish,while the ew Chronicle andGood Government, espitethe ready availability of several fine editions, is not. However, though Guaman Poma's text did not reach its destination, the transcultural currents of expression itexemplifies continued to evolve in theAndes, as they stilldo, less inwriting than in storytelling, ritual, song, dancedrama, painting and sculpture, dress, textile art, forms ofgovernance, religious belief, and many other vernacularart forms. All express the effects of long-term contact andintractable, unequal conflict.

Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation,imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression?these aresome of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscompre

hension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning?these aresome of the perils ofwriting in the contact zone. They alllive among us today in the transnationalized metropolisof theUnited States and are becomingmore widely

visible, more pressing, and, like Guaman Poma's text,more decipherable to those who once would have ignoredthem in defense of a stable, centered sense of knowledgeand reality.

Contact and CommunityThe idea of the contact zone is intended in part to con

trastwith ideas of community that underlie much of thethinking about language, communication, and culturethat gets done in the academy. A couple of years ago,thinking bout the linguistic heories knew, I triedtomake sense of a Utopian quality that often seemed tocharacterize social

analysesof

language bythe

academy.Languages were seen as living in "speech communities,"and thesetendedtobe theorized s discrete, elf-defined,coherent entities, held together by a homogeneous competence or grammar shared identically and equally amongall themembers. This abstract idea of the speech community seemed to reflect, among other things, the Utopianway modern nations conceive of themselves as whatBenedict Anderson calls "imagined communities."3 In abook of that title,Anderson observes that with the possible exception of what he calls "primordial villages,"human communities exist as imagined entitles inwhichpeople "will never know most of their fellow-members,meet them or even hear of them, yet in theminds of eachlives the image of their communion." "Communitiesare distinguished," he goes on to say, "not by their falsity/genuineness,ut by thestylenwhich theyre imagined" (15; emphasis mine). Anderson proposes threefeatures that characterize the style inwhich the modernnation is imagined.First, it is imaginedas limited, y"finite, if elastic, boundaries"; second, it is imagined assovereign-, and, third, it is imagined asfraternal, "a deep,horizontalcomradeship"forwhichmillions ofpeople areprepared"notsomuch tokill aswillinglytodie" (15).Asthe image suggests, the nation-community is embodied

metonymicallyin thefinite, overeign, raternalfigure fthe citizen-soldier.Anderson argues that European bourgeoisies were dis

tinguishedby theirability to "achieve solidarity n anessentiallymagined asis" (74) on a scalefargreater hanthat f elites f other times nd places.Writing and literacy play a central role in this argument. Anderson maintains, as have others, that themain instrument thatmadebourgeois nation-building projects possible was print capitalism. The commercial circulation of books in the various European vernaculars, he argues, was what firstcreated the invisible networks that would eventually


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constitute the literate elites and those they ruled asnations. (Estimates re that180million bookswere putintocirculation inEurope between theyears 1500 and1600 alone.)Now obviously this styleof imaginingof modernnations, as Anderson describes it, is strongly Utopian,

embodyingvalues likeequality,fraternity,iberty,hichthe societies often profess but systematically fail to realize.

The prototype of the modern nation as imagined community was, it seemed tome, mirrored inways peoplethought about language and the speech community.

Many commentators have pointed out how modernviews of language as code and competence assume aunified ndhomogeneous socialworld inwhich languageexists as a shared patrimony?as a device, precisely, forimagining community. An image of a universally sharedliteracy is also part of the picture. The prototypical manifestationf language sgenerally akentobe thespeechofindividual adult native speakers face-to-face (as in Saussure's famous diagram) inmonolingual, even monodialectal situations?in short, the most homogeneous caselinguistically and socially. The same goes forwritten com

munication. Now one could certainly imagine a theorythat assumed different things?that argued, for instance,that the most revealing speech situation for understanding language was one involving a gathering of people eachof whom spoke two languages and understood a thirdand held onlyone language incommonwith anyof theothers. It depends on what workings of language youwant to see or want to see first, on what you choose todefine as normative.

In keeping with autonomous, fraternal models of community, analyses of language use commonly assume thatprinciples of cooperation and shared understanding arenormally in effect. Descriptions of interactions betweenpeople

in conversation, classrooms, medical and bureaucratic settings, readily take it for granted that the situationis governed by a single set of rules or norms shared by allparticipants. The analysis focuses then on how those rulesproduce or fail to produce an orderly, coherent exchange.

Models involving games and moves are often used todescribe interactions. Despite whatever conflicts or systematic social differencesmight be inplay, it isassumedthat all participants are engaged in the same game andthat the game is the same for all players. Often it is. Butof course it often is not, as, for example, when speakersare from different classes or cultures, or one party is exercising authority and another is submitting to itor questioning it. Last year one ofmy children moved to a newelementary school that had more open classrooms andmore flexible curricula than the conventional school he

started out in.A few days into the term, we asked himwhat itwas like at the new school. "Well," he said,"they're a lot nicer, and they have a lot less rules. Butknowwhythey'reicer?""Why?" I asked. "Soyou'll obeyall the rulesthey on't have," he replied.This isa verycoherent analysis with considerable elegance and explanatory power, but probably not the one his teacher wouldhave given.When linguisticor literate) nteraction sdescribed interms of orderliness, games, moves, or scripts, usuallyonly legitimate moves are actually named as part of thesystem, here legitimacy sdefined from thepoint ofview of the party in authority?regardless of what otherparties might see themselves as doing. Teacher-pupil lan

guage,forexample,tendstobe described almostentirelyfrom the point of view of the teacher and teaching, notfrom thepoint of viewofpupils and pupiling (theworddoesn't even exist, though the thing certainly does). If aclassroom is analyzed as a social world unified andhomogenized with respect to the teacher, whatever students do other than what the teacher specifies is invisibleor anomalous to the analysis. This can be true in practiceas well. On several occasions my fourth grader, the onebusy obeying all the rules they didn't have, was given writing assignments that took the form of answering a seriesof questions to build up a paragraph. These questionsoften skedhim to identifyith the interests f those inpower over him?parents, teachers, doctors, publicauthorities. He invariably sought ways to resist or subvertthese assignments. One assignment, for instance, calledfor imagining "a helpful invention." The students wereasked towrite single-sentence responses to the followingquestions:What kind of invention ould helpyou?How would ithelpyou?Why would youneed it?What would it ook like?Would otherpeople be able touse it lso?What would be an invention ohelpyourteacher?What would be an invention to help your parents?

Manuel's reply read as follows:A grate adventchin

Some inventchins reGRATE!!!!!!!!!!! My inventchinwould be ashot thatwould put everythingyou learn t school inyourbrain.Itwould helpme by letting e graduate right ow!! Iwould needitbecause itwould letme playwith my freinds,go on vacachinand, do fun a lotmore. Itwould look likea regular shot.Atherpeaplewould use to.This inventchin ould helpmy teacherparents get away froma lot ofwork. I thinka shot like thiswouldbeGRATE!


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Despite the spelling, the assignment received the usualstar o indicate hetask ad been fulfilledn n acceptableway. No recognition was available, however, of thehumor, the attempt to be critical or contestatory, to parody the structures of authority. On that score, Manuel'sluck was only slightly better than Guaman Poma's. Whatis the place of unsolicited oppositional discourse, parody,resistance, critique in the imagined classroom community? re teacherssupposed tofeelthattheirteaching asbeen most successful when they have eliminated suchthingsndunified the socialworld,probably intheir wnimage? ho wins whenwe do that? ho loses?Such questionsmay be hypothetical,because in theUnited States in the 1990s,many teachersfind themselves less and less able to do that even if

theywant to.

The compositionof thenational collectivity schangingand so are the styles, as Anderson put it, inwhich it isbeing imagined. In the 1980s inmany nation-states,imagined ational syntheseshathad retainedhegemonicforce began to dissolve. Internal social groups with histories nd lifeways ifferent rom the officialones beganinsisting on those histories and lifeways as part of their citizenship, as the very mode of their membership in thenational collectivity. n theirdialogueswith dominantinstitutions, many groups began asserting a rhetoric ofbelongingthatmade demands beyond those f representation and basic rights granted from above. In universitieswe started to hear, "I don't just want you to letme behere, want tobelonghere; this nstitutionhouldbelongtome as much as it does to anyone else." Institutionshave responded with, among other things, rhetorics ofdiversity and multiculturalism whose import at thismoment is up for grabs across the ideological spectrum.These shiftsrebeing lived utbyeveryone orking ineducation today, and everyone is challenged by them inone way or another. Those of us committed to educational democracy are particularly challenged as thatnotionfinds itselfbesiegedon thepublic agenda.Manyof those who govern us display, openly, their interest in aquiescent, ignorant, manipulable electorate. Even as anideal, the concept of an enlightened citizenry seems tohave disappeared from the national imagination. A couple ofyears go theuniversityhere Iworkwent throughan intense and wrenching debate over a narrowly definedWestern-culture requirement that had been institutedthere n 1980. Itkept boilingdown to a debate over theideas of national patrimony, cultural citizenship, andimagined community. In the end, the requirement wastransformed ntoamuch more broadlydefined coursecalled Cultures, Ideas, Values.4 In the context of thechange, a new course was designed that centered on the

Americas and themultiple culturalhistories (includingEuropean ones) that have intersected here. As you canimagine, the course attracted a very diverse student body.

The classroom functioned not like a homogeneous community or a horizontal alliance but like a contact zone.Every single textwe read stood in specific historical relationships to the students in the class, but the range andvariety of historical relationships in play were enormous.Everybodyhad a stake innearlyeverythinge read,buttherange ndkind of stakes ariedwidely.Itwas the most exciting teaching we had ever done,and also the hardest. We were struck, for example, at howanomalous the formal lecture became in a contact zone(who can forget Ata

huallpa throwingownthe Bible because itwould not speak tohim?). The lecturer'straditional(imagined)task?unifying the

world in the class'seyes by means of a

monologue that ringsequally coherent, revealing, and true for all,forging an ad hoc com

munity, homogeneouswith respect to one's

Are teacherssupposedtofeel thattheir teaching hasbeen most successfulwhen theyhaveunifiedthe ocialworld, robably intheir own image?

own words?this task became not only impossible butanomalous and unimaginable. Instead, one had toworkin the knowledge thatwhatever one said was going to besystematically received in radically heterogeneous waysthatwe were neither able nor entitled to prescribe.The very nature of the course put ideas and identitieson the line. All the students in the class had the experience, for example, of hearing their culture discussed andobjectified inways thathorrifiedthem;all thestudentssaw theirrootstracedback to legacies f bothgloryandshame; all the students experienced face-to-face the ignorance and incomprehension, and occasionally the hostility, f others. In the absence of community values and thehope of synthesis, itwas easy to forget the positives; thefact, for instance, that kinds of marginalization oncetaken for granted were gone. Virtually every student washaving theexperience f seeingtheworld describedwithhim or her in it.Along with rage, incomprehension, andpain, there were exhilarating moments of wonder andrevelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom?thejoys of the contact zone. The sufferings and revelationswere, at different moments to be sure, experienced byevery student. No one was excluded, and no one was safe.


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The fact that no one was safe made all of us involved inthe course appreciate the importance ofwhat we came tocall "safe houses." We used the term to refer to social andintellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselvesas horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities withhigh degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporaryprotection from legacies of oppression. This iswhy, as werealized, multicultural curricula should not seek to replaceethnic or women's studies, for example. Where there arelegacies f subordination, roupsneed places forhealingand mutual recognition, safe houses inwhich to constructshared understandings, knowledges, claims on the worldthat they can then bring into the contact zone.

Meanwhile, our job in the Americas course remains tofigure out how tomake that crossroads the best site forlearning hat t anbe.We are looking orthepedagogicalarts of the contact zone. These will include, we are sure,exercises nstorytellingnd in identifyingith the ideas,interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments intransculturation and collaborative work and in the arts ofcritique,parody,and comparison (includingunseemlycomparisons between elite and vernacular cultural forms);the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engagewith suppressed spectsofhistory including their wnhistories), ways to move into and out 0/rhetorics ofauthenticity; ground rules for communication across linesof difference nd hierarchy hatgo beyond politenessbut

maintain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the allimportant concept of cultural mediation. These arts werein play in every room at the extraordinary Pittsburgh conference on literacy. I learned a lot about them there, and Iam thankful.

Notes'For an introduction in English to these and other aspects ofGuaman Pomas work, see Rolena Adorno. Adorno andMercedes

Lopez-Baralt pioneered the studyofAndean symbolic systems inGuaman Poma.2It s farfromclear thattheRoyalCommentarieswas as benign as the

Spanish seemed to assume. The book certainlyplayed a role inmaintainingthe identity nd aspirationsof indigenouselites in theAndes. Inthemid-eighteenth century,a new edition of theRoyal Commentarieswas suppressed by Spanish authorities because itspreface included aprophecy by SirWalter Raleigh that theEnglishwould invadePeru andrestore he Incamonarchy.3The discussion of community here is summarized frommy essay"LinguisticUtopias.""For information about thisprogram and the contents of coursestaught in it,write Program inCultures, Ideas,Values (CIV), StanfordUniv., Stanford, A 94305.

Works Cited_Adorno, Rolena. Guaman Poma de Ayala: Writing and Resistance in

Colonial Peru.Austin: U ofTexas P, 1986.Anderson, Benedict. ImaginedCommunities: Reflections n theOriginsand Spread of ationalism. London: Verso, 1984.Garcilaso de laVega, El Inca. Royal Commentaries of the ncas. 1613.Austin: U ofTexas P, 1966.Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. El primer nueva coronica y buen

gobierno.Manuscript. Ed. JohnMurra and Rolena Adorno. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1980.Pratt,Mary Louise. "Linguistic Utopias." The Linguistics ofWriting.Ed. Nigel Fabb et al.Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987. 48-66.Trevino, Gloria. "Cultural Ambivalence inEarly Chicano Prose Fiction."Diss. StanfordU, 1985.

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