Encountering the Other: Postcolonial Theory and Composition Scholarship.

Abstract

reasoning and an assertion of self, the later on mutual benefit. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.159 on Tue, 17 May 2016 05:17:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Encountering the Other 53 2This position is particularly associated with the work of Emmanuel Levinas and is elaborated in the work of Luce Irigaray (see Hirsh and Olson). 3One of the finest works I know on the subject is Evelyn Ashton-Jones' "Collaboration, Conversation, and the Politics of Gender." 4This is not to deny the power of ideology in formingthe choices we make. At the same time that postmodern theory illustrates the need to participate actively in our ethical decision-making, it also reveals the extent to which our ideological frameworks can work to limit the very choices we make or are able to make. 5Of course, direct discussion of ethics is becoming more common, as indicated, for example, by the work of James Porter. Also see Moore and Kleine. interestingly, Patricia Bizzell has even argued that the contact zone can be used as a way to reorganize literary study: "This concept can aid us both because it emphasizes the conditions of difficulty and struggle under which literatures from different cultures come together (thus forestalling the disrespectful glossing over of differences), and because it gives us a conceptual base for bringing these literatures together, namely, when they occur in or are brought to the same site of struggle or 'contact zone'" (166). 7 A revised version of Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" serves as the introduction of her book ImperialEyes:Studiesin Travel WritingandTransculturation. 8Giroux makes a similar point about how compositionists and literacy scholars have appropriated the work of Freire: "What has been increasingly lost in the North American and Western appropriation of Freire's work is the profound and radical nature of its theory and practice as an anti-colonial and postcolonial discourse" (193). 9 A telling indication of the deradicalizingof a potent concept like contact zone is that textbooks are beginningto emerge that attempt to "apply" contact zone theory in their overall pedagogy. If, as Kathleen Welch argues, textbooks are the most conservative repositories of our knowledge at any given moment, then one wonders what the implications are of contact zone theory being packaged in textbooks. I'm reminded, too, of CH. Knoblauch's observation about social construction: "One can be quite sure, however, that when roving, and normally warring, bands of cognitive psychologists, text linguists, philosophers of composition, historians of rhetoric, Marxist critics, poststructuralists, and reader response theorists all wax equally enthusiastic about 'the social construction of reality,' there is a good chance that the expression has long since lost its capacity to name anything important or even very interesting" (54). 10There are, of course, notable exceptions, but few if any draw on the kind of postcolonial theory I will be discussing shortly. 1 'In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire discusses the dynamic in which the oppressed desire to become like the oppressor, and he warns literacy workers to be prepared for such desire as the oppressed gain critical consciousness (Chapter \ passim, especially 29). 12The story that Pratt tells of Guaman Poma's New Chronicle illustrates this very point, in that Poma provides a revisionist history, "written in a mixture of Quechua and ungrammatical, expressive Spanish," that imitates and parodies the official discourse: "Guaman Poma constructs his text by appropriating and adapting pieces of the representational repertoire of the invaders" ("Arts" 34,36). 13In a recent interview, Freire addresses misreadings of his position on teacher authority and the ethical obligation of teachers to exercise their authority (Olson). 14 A notable recent work on thesubject isXin Liu Gale's Teacher Authority in thePostmodem Classroom, a winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award for the most outstanding book on composition theory. 15One encouraging development is this special issue of JA Con postcolonialtheory andcomposition. 16I'd like to thank Evelyn Ashton-Jones, Julie Drew, Debrajacobs, andTodd Taylor for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.