Editor’s Preface: Contact Zones and Safe Houses

. . . contact zones. I use this term to refer to 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.

Mary Louise Pratt¹

When Mary Louise Pratt coined the phrase “contact zone,” her focus was on education, specifically education with little room for the meaningful, fully integrated learning she had watched her son and his best friend experience when they first discovered baseball cards. Although the published keynote from which the epigraph above was taken does not dwell on medicine, the essays and reviews in this issue suggest that the contact zone may be as useful a term for understanding the medical encounter, medical education, and the reflexive texts they engender as it has been for understanding, enacting, and theorizing the educational process in multicultural, polyglot classrooms in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

“Descriptions of interactions between people in conversation, classrooms, medical and bureaucratic settings,” writes Pratt,

readily take it for granted that the situation is governed by a single set of rules or norms shared by all participants. . . . Despite whatever conflicts or systematic social differences might be in play, it is assumed that all participants are engaged in the same game and that the game is the same for all players. Often it is. But of course it often is not, as, for example, when speakers are from different classes or cultures, or one party is exercising authority and another is submitting to it or questioning it.

(38)

Pratt’s words here echo the classic entry into many, many arguments for including various humanities values in medicine. The differentials in power, culture, and economics that obtain between healthcare providers and patients have long been our contact zone.

In other academic fields attuned to the importance and implications of politics in every element of life, especially literary criticism, Pratt’s words and her description of the contact zone class she taught have been part of a call to action, a call to a kind of counter-cultural resistance that has become the norm for many in the academy. Her description of that contact zone class will, no doubt, strike a familiar chord:

The very nature of the course put ideas and identities on the line. All the students in the class had the experience, for example, of hearing their culture discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them; all the students saw their roots traced back to legacies of both glory and shame; all the students experienced face-to-face the ignorance and incomprehension, and occasionally the hostility, of others. In the absence of community values and the hope of synthesis, it was easy to forget the positives; the fact, for instance, that kinds of marginalization once taken for granted were gone. Virtually every student was having the experience of seeing the world described with him or her in it. . . . No one was excluded, and no one was safe.

(39)

In conjunction with other, similar theoretical perspectives, experiencing and mastering the rhetoric of the contact zone in their own educations has helped to produce generations of scholars and critics with normative habits of reading and responding to texts that Ann Jurecic in her remarkable new book, Illness as Narrative, citing Paul Ricoeur, calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” “Distrust of texts’ errors, lies, and manipulations has become prescriptive,” Jurecic writes.

For scholars trained in such habits of reading, the idea of trusting a narrative to provide access to the experience of another person indicates a naïve understanding of how such texts function. Before a contemporary critic begins to read an autobiography about cancer or pain, she knows that it has been constructed by medical discourse and political, economic, and cultural forces. She also knows that common readers are likely to misread it because they will assume they can try on the experience of the author and that they will therefore succumb to the myriad powers of dominant discourse. She is also...