Thoughts on Cultual Hybridities and the Authority of an Audience

Throughout Mary Louise Pratt's article "Arts of the Contact Zone," the author discusses the variety of rhetorical contact zones in literacy found throughout history; from her son's bartering of baseball cards to Guaman Poma's seventeenth century New Chronicle, Pratt illustrates the wide variety of contact zones found within various literacies. Pratt defines contact zones as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power..." (1). In Poma's case, his writing incorporated native Quechua and non-native Spanish to form a message; this is an example of cultural hybridity as described by Barbara Monroe's January 12, 2010 lecture, the mix of cultures to create a different identity in order to speak with those around them. Pratt continues to explain these identities through the use of autoethnographic text, a "text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them" (2). Quite often, these representations are a response to those in power, the authority in a given situation. Poma's letter addressed the Spanish because they were they authority in Peru at the time and would determine the validity of Poma's writing; Pratt notes that "legitimacy is defined from the point of view of the party in authority--regardless of what other parties might see themselves as doing" (5).

In his chapter "What in the World Is Contrastive Rhetoric?," Robert B. Kaplan addresses language as a broad system of communication. He address five questions in which students and writers may approach the complex nature of composition, many that address the person of authority in the writing process. Cultural backgrounds affect a writer's ability to address a question or discuss a topic, particularly if the audience--the person(s) of authority--are intimidating within their understanding of social hierarchies: "learners so inhibited [by 'whom they perceive to have authority'] may be accused of failing to exercise critical thinking, but they may not see themselves as authorized to undertake such an act" (Kaplan x). Considering the audience is a powerful and potentially inhibiting aspect to writing; for students, the teacher will grade an assignment and may thus be perceived in a certain manner, altering the student's written content. The cultural backgrounds and perceptions of a writer add to their writing, from grammar to content to critical thinking.

In her lecture, Monroe introduced contact zones using the analogy of playing cards to illustrate the ways in which people may express their own culture identity and understanding of culture according to their context. When playing cards, each distinct card may be used to alter the outcome of a game, similar to the ways people are composed of many cultural identities and use them according to a situation. An example of a distinct contact zone in which several cultures have been in contact for hundreds of years is the southwest region of the United States. To depict this contact visually, the flag of New Mexico integrates the highly symbolic figure of the Zia sun of the Zia Pueblo Indians with the Spanish colors of bright red and yellow. While this combination of cultures may be disputed from a historical perspective to reasons of modern economics, the flag displays the contact between cultures and the cooperation between the two in a type of interculturality.