LITR 5731 Colonial-Postcolonial
Literature
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1st Research Posts 2009
Sarah DeLaRosa
Exploring the Connection Between Colonial and Postcolonial Literature Studies and Contact Zone Theory
Dr. White’s Colonial-Postcolonial Literature class is my first formal experience with this subject area and, half way into the semester, I am becoming very interested and excited about it. In fact, I am becoming so quickly enamored with colonial-postcolonial studies that I am trying to work my Master’s thesis around it and perhaps blend it with something to make it more personal. One topic that I am considering combining with colonial-postcolonial literature is contact zone theory—a theory I first learned about at the start of my graduate career and have since become very familiar with. Contact zones, as defined by the creator of the theory, Mary Louise Pratt, are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple 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 parts of the world today” (Pratt 4). I am using this research post to explore the intersection of colonial-postcolonial literature and contact zone theory and see what connections have already been made.
I have found a moderate amount of literature combining colonial-postcolonial literature studies and contact zone theory, whether explicitly or implicitly. Two essays that I found theorize the connection between colonial-postcolonial literature and contact zone theory. In her foundational text, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Pratt speaks of ethnographic and autoethnographic texts, two classifications of literature that form part of colonial-postcolonial literature. She describes them saying: “ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others),” and “autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts” (Pratt 5-6, her emphasis). Thinking of Dr. White’s class, the ethnographic texts Pratt mentions seem to me to be a type of colonial text, like Robinson Crusoe, dealing with an Other world and the Other people who inhabit it, while a text like Lucy would be an autoethnographic, postcolonial text. Pratt goes on to explain that autoethnographic texts are “a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror, […] merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations” (6). This is very similar to what I found in an essay by Lourdes Torres about “code-switching” and “new Englishes.” “Code-switching,” Torres writes, is “the alternation of two languages in a verbal or written text” which indicates “an artistic choice with political ramifications” (76). She is focusing on a “mainstream space where Spanish and English are in contact” (Torres 76). Torres writes mainly about the code-switching of Latino writers in the United States, a group that constitutes a very large contact zone in our country. She calls them “outsiders” who appropriate English from a novel perspective” (Torres 76). Theirs is a type of postcolonial literature, characterized by the code-switching style.
Two other essays that I found in my research deal with the practical application of contact zone theory to colonial-postcolonial literature. Patricia Bizzell wants to change the way in which we traditionally study literature and employ both contact zone and colonial-postcolonial ideas. She suggests “that we organize English studies not in terms of literary or chronological periods, nor essentialized [sic] racial or gender categories, but rather in terms of historically defined contact zones, moments when different groups within the society contend for the power to interpret what is going on” (Bizzell 53). We should “be reading all the texts as brought to the contact zone, for the purpose of communicating across cultural boundaries,” which would provide “a rationale for integrating English studies multiculturally” (Bizzell 54). What Bizzell talks about in this essay, “Multiculturalism, Contact Zones, and the Organization of English Studies,” really excites me, and I look forward to organizing my own classes like this one day. Phyllis van Slyck takes Bizzell’s classroom application a step further and discusses the challenges a contact zone, colonial-postcolonial course can bring. Van Slyck explains that she teaches “a variety of postcolonial, nonwestern, and other so-called minority texts, in conjunction with western texts,” asking “students to deal directly with issues of cultural difference in an artificial space—the classroom—which does not appear to them to be safe or neutral” (151). She says that she wants to challenge her students by offering them “modes of resistance to their own and their peers’ cultural chauvinism, yet [she does] not want members of the class to divide into separate and hostile camps” (van Slyck 151-2). I have seen classrooms divided over issues of values and beliefs that students are very resolute in, so I know that this is a very real tendency, but I agree with van Slyck in thinking that the benefits of this combination of colonial-postcolonial studies and contact zone theory outweigh the potential for classroom awkwardness.
In answer to my original query, there are several instances of writers connecting contact zone theory to the study of colonial-postcolonial literature. It seems to me though that, the contact zone being relatively newly founded (Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” was originally presented in 1990), there is still room left for experimentation and literature concerning it. I have not been dissuaded from considering the combination of contact zone theory and colonial-postcolonial literature for use in my Master’s thesis. However in this research I have encountered other topics concerning colonial and postcolonial literature that I might pursue, and I will explore one of these options in my next research post.
Works Cited
Bizzell, Patricia. “Multiculturalism, Contact Zones, and the Organization of English Studies.” Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together. Ed. Janice M. Wolff. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002. 48-57.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together. Ed. Janice M. Wolff. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002. 1-18.
Torres, Lourdes. “In the Contact Zone: Code-Switching Strategies by Latino/a Writers.” MELUS, vol 32 no 1. Spring 2007. 75-96.
Van Slyck, Phyllis. “Repositioning Ourselves in the Contact Zone.” College English, vol 59 no 2. February 1997.