Summary Of Art Of The Contact Zone By Mary Louise Pratt

In Mary Louise Pratt's "Art of the Contact Zone," she describes a theoretical intersection between two cultures. This is, as she defines it, the aforementioned Contact Zone. Within this "space," Pratt identifies an unbalanced relationship between cultures, a relationship which can lead to slavery and war based on cultural and potentially ethnic differences between the cultures in question. This "Contact Zone," however can be beneficial, in the aspect of cultural diffusion or "transculturation" as Pratt refers to the concept. Pratt uses the example of an Andean learning Spanish as a way to address the king of Spain with a letter, telling of the Andean culture that existed prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. This idea of the contact zone can