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The contact zone

“What is the contact zone?” Mary Louis Pratt, the author, describes the contact zone as being “ …term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slaver, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” (Pg 607) To simply put it’s the meeting of two separate entities and one trying to be the head and the other the tail. The whole idea of the contact zone according to the author based on two things her sons view of the world and a Andean man named Poma de Ayala’s view of his world hundreds of years ago. In modern America there are so many examples such as: minority vs. majority, young vs. old, student vs. teacher, so on and so forth. The contact zone can be seen in everyday life,in the case of her son or it can be literary, in the case of Poma. Writing in the contact zone has good and bad qualities.
Some of the good qual...

Posted by: Arianna Escobar

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