(Re)defining Contact Zones

In the Spring of 2006, I taught my second section of freshman composition at California State University Stanislaus, in Turlock, California. Turlock is part of "The Valley" north of Fresno and south of Sacramento, and has a wide range of ethnicities. My class that semester had fourteen students, only two of whom were White. About midway through the semester, we read several articles on race and racism in the U.S. My two White students expressed their opinions and seemed fairly comfortable with the topic, while my Hispanic, Hmong, Arabic, and African students remained reticent. I recognized that my non-White students did not see themselves as belonging to our classroom community (or at least, not as full members of it). Kenneth Burke defines belonging as "the identifications whereby a specialized activity makes one a participant in some social or economic class. Belonging in this sense is rhetorical" (28). So I decided to use this definition of belonging and strategically played the "ace up my sleeve." I informed them that according to the "White Man's law" I was not White; I was Cherokee, which made me a minority. My two White students stiffened and sat up straighter in their chairs, and my twelve non-White students physically relaxed. In Pratt's terms, I became a heterogeneous text: I had just been "ready very differently [by] people in different positions in the contact zone." To my White students I had been White; I belonged to their culture, their community. But my announcement suddenly Othered me from them, and included me in the non-White community (which led to some great discussions and much more openness from the other minority students).

I start with this story because that classroom was a contact zone, and it was the first time that I saw how much racism and colonialism were still a part of those students' identities. That one day made me "reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing" (Pratt). My "model" of community is much more of a Whiteheadan concresence than any sort of traditional static "Leave It to Beaver" type, but for my students, there were still very clear boundaries between races and cultures. In fact, the one day that I brought my dogs to class, my two Egyptian students didn't attend, because in their culture dogs are not pets and they would never socialize with them.

Pratt's article also resonated with me when she was discussing transculturation and stated that "subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, [but] they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for." In my research last semester of American Indian enrollment, I discovered that the controversial issue of blood quantum was something originally imposed on Indians by the American government, but it was also something that many tribes incorporated into their definition of Indianness. Prior to being booted off their land, the Cherokee sense of culture was a social one; there was no concept of race or blood determining whether or not one was Cherokee. However, after being moved to Oklahoma and the General Allotment Act divvying up Indian Territory, it was the U.S. government that decided that "Indian" meant a person had to be at least half "Indian," live on the reservation in Oklahoma (not in a neighboring state), and be registered on the Dawes Roles to qualify for land. The Cherokee Nation, when it re-established itself several decades later, then absorbed the notion that to be Cherokee, one had to trace one's lineage back to someone on the Dawes Roles. So for me, while I have a greater blood quantum than many registered Cherokee, I can never be a member of the tribe because my ancestors were not included on the Dawes Roles.

My image of culture is a word-image, a recognition that there are no clear boundaries between individual and society, self and Other (Other including the non-human as well); it is of a mobile described in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed:

[It was] a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in complexly interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. (295)

As Donna Haraway states, our relationship with Others is a "contradictory story of relationships -- co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all" (300). To recognize identity and cultural identity as co-constitutive relationships means that the relationships are constantly building upon each other, that there is no fixing of identities because each is shaping the other, and thus "never quite meeting, never entirely parting." I think this is what Guaman Poma's point was in writing that text in both languages, and also why it is so long, because he was exploring how the Spanish and Incan cultures could shape each other, and that there was no end to the relating.

Both Pratt and Kaplan support the notion of culture being open-ended, not a "container for fixed values" (Monroe). Kaplan's notion of contrastive rhetoric could be seen to be limiting, had he not specifically stated near the end of the article that, "[i]t was never intended to be replacive; rather, it was always perceived as being additive -- contributing to the resources available for discourse building" (xvi). I find Kaplan's article very interesting because it doesn't occur to me not to use contrastive rhetoric in my classroom. I specifically challenge my students to look at controversial issues and to learn to see them from different perspectives, always aware that their beliefs are their own, but that by learning to see issues from different points of view, they can begin to understand others, and perhaps begin a dialogue with them. A philosophy and religion instructor I was lucky enough to study under, Dr. Jacob Needleman, once stated that he saw the various religions as "different paths up the same mountain," and that principle is what I try to instill in my students. Our interactions with Others shape us as much as we shape them, and since the interacting is ongoing, there can never be one clear winner.

Further Reading:

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives.

Haraway, Donna. "Cyborgs to Companion Species," The Haraway Reader.

Pratt, M. L. (1991). "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession 91: 33-40.

Kaplan, R. B. Forward: What in the World is Contrastive Rhetoric?: vii-xx.