I love Mary Louise Pratt. When I say I love an author, I usually mean that their ideas have inspired me to think differently about important things in my own life. With Pratt, the idea is the "contact zone." Pratt's theory of the contact zone has reframed for me how I think about teaching -- what works and doesn't work with the diverse students we see in our classrooms today.
If you don't know, the contact zone refers to those spaces where "cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other" usually in the context of "asymmetrical relations of power." In other words, a classroom. Traditionally, the teacher is lord and master; the students must do what she says. The contact zone idea forces teachers to examine the structure we take for granted, examining the ways in which power relations in the classroom might get in the way of real learning.
I personally think the contact zone provides an awesome way of reading and thinking about literature. For instance, I never really liked the book Jane Eyre until I read it in grad school. My professor paired Jane Eyre with Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. The books are from two different eras, two different countries and contexts. Their authors are two different "races;" by conservative standards, these two books should never have been taught together in the same class. My prof taught them as a "contact zone," presenting Jane as a reflection of British Imperialism and Rhys' novel as a post-colonial, feminist response, in which Bertha claims back her voice and explains how she came to be Rochester's "mad" wife. It was one of the best, most powerful and memorable reading experiences of my whole life.
Reading Jane Eyre in the contact zone helped me understand the novel in its social and historical contexts. It was, in fact, published in 1847, while British imperialism was in full swing, and going largely uncriticized. (It wasn't until the 1870s that "Imperialism" became a widely used word in the English language, and early criticism of Imperialist policy came not from England, but from Russia.) Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, when scholars engaged in post-colonial criticism were questioning the centrality of the literary canon, which was dominated by white writers and traditional perspectives.
Reading Jane Eyre by itself gives a reader a morality tale about a young woman blinded by love. However, taking the two novels together allows the reader to see Rochester as a symbol for British power and Bertha as his colonized subject. Wide Sargasso Sea introduces Bertha as a young Caribbean woman named Antoinette who has been renamed by her English husband. She says, "My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?" and Rochester responds, "Because it is a name I am particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha" (81). Just as English soldiers renamed the countries they colonized, Rochester renames his wife and claims her as his property. While in Jane Eyre, Bertha has no voice, no spoken dialog, in Wide Sargasso Sea, it's Rochester who goes unnamed, taking some of the power back from the character. Rochester is certainly not a sympathetic character in Jane Eyre, either, but the pairing gives a reader a full context for his treachery and completes the symbolism -- Rochester becomes a representative for Imperialism and patriarchal values, and Jane's story becomes more about "the anger of the powerless," as Adrienne Rich notes.
It wasn't until long after grad school that I was able to make the connection that Mary Louise Pratt had made this reading experience possible for me. Literary scholar Patricia Bizzell has argued that Pratt's theory of the contact zone can give us a framework for re-imagining the study of literature. Bizzell argues that, instead of organizing English Studies in terms of period or genre (like "19th c. American Novel") or essentialized category (such as "Contemporary Woman Writers" or "the African American Novel"), we should study literature from the perspective of contact zones and instead look at "literature of segregation" or "literature of the class war." Bizzell's theory is pretty radical when you consider how little has changed about how we study literature, as if things like class wars and civil rights movements were not occurring all around us.
If you think about it, doing research on -- and therefore being able to offer college courses on -- things like "the African American novel" puts novels by Black American writers into a single, essentialized category, that ignores differences based on things like class and gender and history, allowing us to consider "Literature" as discrete works of art apart from their cultural context. The contact zone metaphor gives us a way of putting literature back into context, letting us see writing as always a sight of struggle, as "moments when different groups within the society contend for the power to interpret what is going on" (Pratt 463). In my opinion, this makes literature more fun!
More importantly, rethinking the study of literature and writing in terms of the contact zone can help us reengage our diverse students in course work and class discussion. It creates a starting point for students to discuss
and debate meaning, which might help us create the next generation of
literary critics. Putting two texts into conversation with one another like my professor did can help students understand writing as an ongoing dialog that doesn't end when a writer puts down her pen, or when a reader closes the book.
