Comparative Analysis – Art of the Contact Zone essay

Comparative Analysis – Art of the Contact Zone
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October 14, 2019
It is a widely accepted belief in the field of Social sciences that one’s language is connected to one’s identity. These two create an interconnected link where a disruption in one causes a ripple effect to the other. Accordingly, as colonization and globalization set in, these changes have continued to proliferate. On the positive side, it brought about the phenomenon also known as ‘transculturation’, where a person’s language and identity becomes more homogenous. On the other hand, however, these changes have also led to power struggles where ‘minor cultures’ becomes subsumed under ‘major’ ones. In this article, the author would discuss about how both of these effects could be seen in the article written by Anzaldúa (1987) and Pratt (1991), entitled How to Tame a Wild Tongue and Arts of the Contact Zone, respectively. All in all, the author believes that contrary to the belief that transculturation creates an “inferior” version of one’s identity, the very fact that such pieces becomes more “varied” and “unique” means that it is equally sophisticated than the dominant culture where it originated.
Cultured and Uncultured Language
Anzaldúa’s (1987) article discussed about how language differences created a power play between different cultures, whereby one becomes inferior to the other. To illutrate this, she noted how our modern day culture views Mexicans who speak Chicano as inferior to those who spoke English or French in the first place. This goes the same for people who have were never able to ‘neutralize their accent’, in order to remove traces of their own cultural identities. Accordingly, Anzaldúa noted that contrary to how people view it, these ‘minor languages’ are never inferior but rather a unique expression of one’s cultural identity. She even called these different variations of the Chicanos as a “living language”, since it developed naturally and serves as an anchor to which people could express their own cultural identity.
Transculturation and Language Struggle
Mary Louise Pratt (1991), in her article entitled Art of the Cont...