Contact Zones Finding Contact Zones

Contact Zones Finding Contact Zones in "Finding Forrester" According to the essayist Mary Louise Pratt, contact zones are social spaces where cultures may or must meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.

Pratt, over the course of her essay, uses examples such as her son's initiation into the foreign culture of Japan and the history of the Depression through the medium of baseball cards as an example of the often unexpected yet ubiquitous presence of contact zones in all of our daily lives. To provide a shaper historical context, she also documents in detail Guaman Poma's early project to put the non-literate Incan culture into document of writing comprehensible to a White audience.

Likewise, in the Gus Van Zandt directed film, "Finding Forester," sports and literacy become contact zones, but in the contemporary age, and in a social sphere almost as riddled with imbalanced class status as a colonial society -- namely, that of a preparatory school. Jamal Wallace is given a sports scholarship to a fancy prep school, and his life's intermixing with the privileged world of white boys becomes a contact zone, on the court and in the classroom.

Wallace's mere presence, whether he wants it to or not, challenges notions not simply about White excellence, but also White intelligence, for he embodies both Black dreams of athleticism but also Black intellectual strivings. He wishes to become a writer as well as a high school basketball star. The preparatory school thus exists as a contact zone, a living symbol of White authority and also White exclusivity of other races and classes from the bastions of power.

But although the relationship of scholarship student to privileged prep students, and of students to faculty members is profoundly asymmetrical, discomfitures result both when the Black student struggles at first, and then excels, when he realizes that the school's athletic reputation requires his performance as much as he needs the stepping-stone of validated scholarship in an academic institution to succeed in life and overcome the American social legacy of racism.

In contact zones, thus learning is never one sided -- both Whites and Blacks learn from Jamal's presence at the school.

Pratt notes of her own experiences in such contact zones of academia, that "the fact that no one was safe" in some areas, "made all of us involved in the course appreciate the importance of what we came to call safe houses," or "social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression. Jamal has no such a 'safe house' in the school.

However, despite Pratt's assertion that a multicultural curricula or ethnic or women's studies provides such safe houses, the film provokes one to doubt that such insulation is ever really possible. In the persona of Forrester, the writer played by Sean Connery who Jamal befriends, Jamal meets a writer and an eccentric who has attempted to entirely isolate himself from society.

But no such safety is truly possible, even for the most brilliant artist, for society and alternative cultural understandings, in the form of other people, intrudes -- in the film's case, in.