Mary Louise Pratt discusses a relatively foreign concept, the contact zone, in her essay "Arts of the Contact Zone." She defines the contact zone as being the "social spaces where cultures 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." This "contact zone" that Pratt describes helps link together two cultures without the knowledge of doing so. One of the examples that stick out in my head is her story of her son and baseball. For years, Pratt's son would trade baseball cards with other kids his age. He learned how to read, a lot of information about cities and states, and he learned how to apply his math skills by figuring out batting averages. Sam started to eat, breathe, and sleep baseball. Almost a decade later, Sam and his friend Willie can start a conversation with an adult and they can understand everything discussed, even if it does not directly relate to baseball. A little later in the essay, Pratt tells us that the contact zone plays such an important role in autoethnographic text, text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations other have make of them. For example, she states that all America's stories about American slaves will always have a Euramerican twist on it because that was who the people were. I never thought about many of the points that Pratt discusses. It did not occur to me that history and written documents change with transculturation, the processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture.
He had even received a scholarship to Pratt's institute of applied art. ... Duke's response was "Look around you, Billy. ... Strayhorn was doing such a good job of listening to the city life that sometimes the musicians couldn't tell if it was Billy's or Duke's work that they were reading (Turkell 98). ...
Yet another example is Mary's formulaic response to the same event: "we must stem the tide of malice, and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other, the balm of sisterly consolation."" ... They can produce, instead, rote and "institutional- responses. ... Collins in his reading of Fordyce), indicates vulgarity and selfishness. ... Further evidence of her indecorous conduct during the absence of her older sisters is revealed in her description of a "piece of fun- recently enjoyed at colonel Forster's: We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman's clothes, on purpose to pass for ...
Once the recommendations are made the AAI is responsible for "coordinating and tracking FAA responses to safety recommendations issued by the National Transportation Safety Board. ... On the industry side we have companies like Boeing, Pratt and Whitney, Aerospace Industries association, and Airbus (4). ...
Nothing more than little signs reading "Telecommuting Today- or "Virtual Office Day- hang from cubicle walls. ... Equally significant is the fact that on any given hour of any day, as many as one-third of the salaried work force isn't in the office (Pratt). ...
