First, a preliminary note: I'm very sorry--I wasn't aware of the new policy on blog posts until I read the e-mail from Dr. Strickland (so it was already too late) and I actually had planned on posting today and tomorrow, so I hadn't even finished the readings when I got the e-mail. Now that I have, there is a lot I want to say; but I first wanted to acknowledge the transgression (one of ignorance, not flouting).
Now that's out of the way, I'll start by saying that I found immediate, personal ways "into" each of the readings this week, and I think it might help to describe each of them as I go down the line.
For Muksian-Schutt, my immediate "in" was her use of the term "contact zones" in her title--I knew the term from having used Mary Louise Pratt's _Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation_ for Dr. Prahlad's English/Anthro 8700 course a few years ago. I quickly turned to Muksian-Schutt's list of "Works Cited" and, sure enough, she was using Pratt as the source for her own use of "contact zones." I know I recommend books a lot and I hope that doesn't distill what I'm about to say: _Imperial Eyes_ is an exceptional book. I know from some of the posts that others were taken with the idea of contact zones--and Leta asks if any one has suggestions about how to use the concept in a less focused manner--so I thought I'd share a little of Pratt's own work--just from the Introduction where she describes her concept a little further. It might help elicit some more practical ideas--or at least "sell" you on picking up a copy of the book.
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From pages 6-7:
In an attempt to suggest a dialectic and historicized approach to travel writing, I have manufactured some terms and concepts along the way. One coinage that recurs throughout the book is the term "contact zone," which I use to refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. I borrow the term "contact" here from its use in linguistics, where the term contact language refers to improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in context of trade. Such languages begin as pidgins, and are called creoles when they come to have native speakers of their own. Like the societies of the contact zone, such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure (Ron Carter has suggested the term "contact literatures" to refer to literatures written in European languages from outside Europe.) "Contact zone" in my discussion is often synonymous with "colonial frontier." But while the latter term is grounded within a European expansionist perspective (the frontier is a frontier only with respect to Europe), "contact zone" is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term "contact," I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A "contact" perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and "travelees," not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.
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(In addition to _Imperial Eyes_ and "Arts of the Contact Zone," the article by Pratt that Muksian-Schutt herself cites, I'd also recommend another of Pratt's articles, "Linguistic Utopias," printed in _The Linguistics of Writing_, edited by Fabb, Attridge, Durant and McCabe (Manchester UP, 1987, pages 48-66).
It occurred to me a while back—after Clair first brought it up in her posts—how much the social relations in the classroom can be described using *analogies* to post-colonial theoretical concepts. Not to yoke violently together two heterogeneous ideas, but it seems to me that Pratt's description of contact zones can be applied to the classroom itself: students in this "contact zone" constitute a "spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect" and this formulation "emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other" and "it treats the relations..." among students and teachers "not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power." In addition to students coming together and intersecting with an instructor in this way, the contact zone model can be used to describe pedagogical strategies *in* the classroom and *about* the classroom. Muksian-Schutt talks about how "students confuse expressing a belief with 'taking a side,' thereby forcing themselves into a 'left/right' dichotomy which does not offer a comfortable conversation entry on moderate ground" (340). Towards the end she reiterates that a goal she had in employing the contact zones model is that "students understood that what they had perceived as lack of position was very much a position, one rooted in moderate ground" (344).
Muksian-Schutt's goals here reminded me of Bean's discussion of group work, particularly when he cites the objection to it that it "devalues eccentricity and teaches social conformity" (166). Along the same lines of teaching students that "moderate ground" can be firm ground, I see Bean's "ideal of group consensus" as productive, too. Just as students often come in to classes with a false dichotomy of left/right, the charge that group consensus "stifles creativity by forcing a leveling of talents... seems grounded in a false premise equating consensus with conformity. There is a qualitative difference between conformity--an easy and quick acquiescence to the first thesis produced by a group member--and a synthesis reached through dialectic conversation" (ibid). Bean goes on to assert that, in his experience, "group work does not suppress eccentric and individualistic ideas but in fact gives them a chance to be aired and tested in group conversation" (167). Group work for Bean, in fact, enacts a critical pedagogy and empowers students: “After working independently, students are more confident in their own views. They become less passive, more active in raising questions, more challenging as audiences” and, Bean asserts, “the class discussions that follow small group work are among the most stimulating, challenging, and satisfying of [all my] teaching experiences” (154). In empowering students, the teacher conversely “becomes more vulnerable, more at risk, than in a lecture setting” (ibid); teachers can “become colearners with students” (149) and fulfill the role of “teacher as coach,” a description Bean has used before.
Bean’s pedagogy itself also seems adaptable to a conflict zones model in which the classroom itself is the subject. Bean foregrounds personality and learning types, as well as gender and cultural differences among students as “worth discussing” (161-2). A class could, for example, “discuss how the socialization of males in American culture tends toward decision making based on abstract rigorously applied principles, whereas females tend to be more concerned with the interpersonal dimension of decision making” (162). One could add to that cultural constituted differences in conversational styles between men and women (as well as regional differences—Southerners, for example, leave a relatively long pause in between the end of an interlocutor’s speech and the beginning of their own, whereas New Yorkers allow for a relatively short amount of time—if a Southerner and a New Yorker hold a conversation, then, the Southerner will leave long pauses that the New Yorker has been conditioned to keep filling, and so the Southerner might feel the New Yorker is rude because s/he dominates the conversation, whereas the New Yorker might think the Southerner is dumb because s/he has nothing to add to the conversation). Bean goes so far as to advocate that teachers “explain to students the positive values of conflict… By showing students how conflict generates creative thinking, the teacher can help students welcome disagreements and see how a watered-down compromise that no one really likes is less valuable than a true synthesis that seems better than either of the original views (ibid). Students can also opt to dissent from the consensus opinion.
(Full disclosure: like Bri, I personally find group work hard to actually participate in—and I actually took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as part of a team building activity when I was a Resident Advisor in the dorms and, back then at least, I was an ENFP. The “E” is for extrovert and the “P” is for perceiving, just like Bean says on 162-3—but unlike Beans’s predictions for Es and Ps, I don’t play well with others when it comes to group projects… so I’ll have to get over it so that I can use this important pedagogical tool).
As Muksian-Schutt points out, when students are not forced to choose sides but can stand somewhere in the middle, it validates their beliefs and helps them become more critical. With that newfound critical mind they can then examine cultural artefacts to interrogate their assumptions and, in doing so, her students became aware of the media's role in forming perceptions of public figures, as well as the historical particularism of one's own era. I value contingency, nuance, acknowledgment of complexities and a resistance to absolutes. Muksian-Schutt's comments reminded me of that Hunter Thompson passage I quoted a few classes back--the one from _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ where Hunter laments the end of the 60s and the "rolling back" of the real social changes that had occured during that time. My point in using it then was to illustrate that Dr. Gonzo didn't portray the 60s in a completely nostalgic light--he didn't fall prey to a false dichotomy--not "us and them" or "then and now." The passage is full of nuance and--to get really weird and use Keats--negative capability.
Another example of a post-colonial reading of classroom dynamics can be found in an affinity I see existing between Pratt and a text I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in reference to Rogerian argument--_The Location of Culture_ by Homi K. Bhabha. Like Pratt, Bhabha analyzes colonizer/colonized relations in terms of interdependence and reflexive constructions of subjectivity--all cultural artefacts are constructed in what he calls the "Third Space of enunciation" (page 37), a "contact zone," one might say. The Third Space can be productive, Bhabha claims, "For a willingness to descend into that alien territory... may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity" (38). The group dynamic in Bean shares with Bhabha an adaptation of the dialectic model--thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Bean’s article also led me to Shen’s. Bean’s observation of how “Americans often state their desires bluntly and assertively in ways that would seem rude in many Asian cultures, where the expression of desire would be masked in roundabout conversation” (162) reminded me of Shen’s discussion of how Chinese writers “beat around the bush” before engaging the matter at hand and this is a crucial difference between Chinese and Anglo-American styles of composition The notion of hybridity suggests the Shen article, too, of course: the negotiation of the "Chinese Self" and the "English Self" is, for me, an intra-personal Third Space or contact zone between cultures--and the hybridity that emerges only after much struggle informs Shen's cautionary tale. Shen is obviously somewhat critical of Maoist China, and understandably so. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was still going in 1975, the year the anecdote that Shen recounts at the beginning of the essay (with the chanting of the slogans and so on) takes place (the arrest of the Gang of Four marks the Cultural Revolution's end, and that happened in '76). But Shen also states plainly that the “Chinese Self” will always be there—Shen hasn’t assimilated or been enculturated; a hybridity between the selves now exists. While I agree with Leta that “it is important that we require international students in our classes to learn to write in traditional Western forms” and that “we would be doing them a disservice if we did not,” Shen’s text also reminded and reinforced for me the flip-side of the coin—which is also implicit in Leta’s observation of “what huge differences there are between Chinese and English styles of composition”—that is to say, that the Anglo-American style of composition is a cultural artefact, much like we discussed in class a couple of weeks ago.
For me it’s important to foreground for students such artifacts in order to demonstrate the arbitrariness of so much that we take for granted as natural—how much of it is culturally constructed (the social constructivists that Bean lists on 165—Rorty, Kuhn, Geertz, and Goffman—is like a Hall of Fame for thinkers, in my opinion). To go (yet again) down the garden of forking paths that is digressive citation, another post-colonial text came to mind in reading Shen's article--and this was reinforced by blog posts commenting on how "naturalized" English writing was for most of us and how Shen's account of his own experience opened eyes. A little into the article, Shen observes that "learning the rules of English composition is, to a certain extent, learning the values of Anglo-American society. In writing classes in the United States I found that I had to reprogram my mind, to redefine some of the basic concepts and values that had been imprinted and reinforced in my mind by my cultural background, and that had been part of me all my life" (217). This immediately reminded me of Gauri Viswanathan's _Masks of Conquest_, in which Viswanathan argues that "the humanistic functions traditionally associated with the study of literature--for example, the shaping of character or the development of the aesthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking--can be vital in the process of sociopolitical control" (2) and that such control was undertaken by the British when it took over the education system of India following the Charter Act of 1813. The British sought to use the hegemonic potential of the educational system to communicate Anglo values and to legitimate British rule and soon discovered the power of English literature as vehicle for naturalizing both: "The strategy of locating authority in these texts all but effaced the sordid history of colonist expropriation, material exploitation, and class and race oppression behind European world dominance" in which "the English literary text functioned as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state" (23). Moving the lens just a bit from reading literature (consumption) to the production of writing, one can see how Shen’s comments can send up red flags.
Well, I’m already on page 5 in the Word version of this, so I’m going to save my screed against Lindquist for another post.
It takes a nation of millions to hold us back…
Court
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