Mary Louise Pratt..Art of the contact zone - Essay Example

This means that the texts show the aspects of the writer’s own personal life. It is like a small part of the autobiography of the writer himself, which shows his or her views on various aspects of life, rather than what other people think. On the other hand, trans-culturation deals with the process, where members of the marginal groups select materials from the dominant culture. It brings in together various other languages and amalgamates them. In her essay, she gives the example of when the Andeans, actually native Peruvians, were encountered by the Spanish and that Guaman Poma had written a 1200 page long letter that was titled “The First New Chronicle and Good Government,” to Phillip III, the Spanish king, who had defeated the Inca empire.

In this contact zone, people who are geographically separated come in contact with each other and one group of people gains control over the other group by becoming their rulers. Many of the people around the world come into various contact zones to teach, learn or contradict ideas and theories that are under scrutiny and objection today. Pratt creates a contact zone through her writings, that is, she brings together ancient writing and the newer education system. She uses examples from the past as well as current times to represent a contact zone through which she expresses her ideas and views.

Her way of expressing views is impressive as they are clear cut and easy to grasp, her “contact zone” that is. She brings to view that education as a system has to deal with students coming from diverse backgrounds, living different lives and following different culture and traditions. So the teachers need to establish contact zones among students to bring out the best in them. They need to make an environment wherein everybody would accept each other’s way of life, regarding their culture, and respect each other.

This would in turn create a harmonious aura in the classroom and the students can understand life and its various aspects in a better way. But teachers often forget to inculcate such good nature among students as most of them are keen only to cover the academic portions, which are need to be taught for the coming exams. This should not be the case and proper actions should be taken to make schools in an overall way the best teacher that a child could possibly have. When ‘Colombus: Secret from the Grave’ is analyzed and compared to the contact zone described by the essayist, we can find that many of the facts regarding the explorer, Columbus, are wrong.

The answer to the question regarding who Columbus was, is undergoing constant change. History tells us that Columbus was born to a weaver in the Italian city of Genoa and throughout his life he concealed his noble birth. “The discovery channel has come up with the program ‘Columbus: Secrets from the grave’ which gives us the evidence of who Columbus actually was, that he was the son of a wealthy Jew. Scientists were able to extract DNA from Columbus’s son, Hernando” (“Columbus. Secrets from the Grave” Discovery of America par. 1). This discovery was based on Prof.

Merrill’s theory and when this is analyzed keeping in mind Pratt’s contact zone, we can come to the point that he came into contact with the details of the explorer and proves that these ideas of the past were wrong. It can never be said that a