What Happens in the ‘Contact Zone?’

Abstract

A 'CONTACT ZONE', TO SOME OF US, IS STILL A BLACK BOX -or at best a grey one, like this room, or the city of Aachen. Yet it is above all in the 'contact zone' where the really interesting things seem to happen. The concept of 'contact zone' was introduced into postcolonial studies through the agency of Mary Louise Pratt. In her introduction to Imperial Eyes, Pratt defines this key term asthe space of colonial encounters [. . . ] in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict.1Obviously, this definition, while facilitating Pratt's useful and enlightening investigation of the workings of asymmetrical power-relations in colonial Africa and America, does not theorize the complex processes that make a contact zone. This is where we must dig deeper in order to stabilize and differentiate our social and cultural observations concerning intercultural encounters. What is 'contact', to start with? Let me theorize on this, with a jocular eye on what may have happened to someone like Geoff Davis in the ancient contact zone of Aachen.Literally, 'contact' in the first place refers to the mutual experience of touch in a physical encounter, a friendly handshake, for instance, or the touching of noses in a Maori hongi. But 'contact', in general usage, is not an experience limited to the tactile sense. We have eye contact, we contact each other by calling (not only on the telephone), we smell and may even taste each other in intimate intercourse. All the human senses, in fact, may be involved in establishing and remembering human encounters. Direct contacts may be based on visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and, above all, tactile sensations. Such impressions may be felt to be not only more or less intensive but also more or less one-sided or asymmetrical. Our contacts may be active, even aggressive and violent towards the other person, or they may be passive, received in a mode of submission, toleration, reluctance or suffering.Our passive, non-violent contacts are usually referred to by such plain verbs as 'see', 'hear', 'smell', 'taste', and 'touch'. Our more aggressive or even invasive contacts are more aptly described with the intensifying connotations of 'gaze', 'stare', or 'gape'; 'listen', 'sound out', or 'eavesdrop'; 'sniff, 'snoop', or 'snuffle'; 'try', 'test', or 'sample'; 'push', 'grasp', or 'tackle'. Think of tourists and travellers: Geoff may have invaded this place in the conqueror's fashion. But also think of the ways of the established travellees. They may have made it hard for the outsider to be accepted. Obviously, contacts may be established, on the one hand, by more or less intensive acts of seeking the physical (i.e. sensual) presence of the other, or, on the other hand, by more or less passively tolerating and admitting the approach of the contact-seeker. Quite often, both parties, at first sight, are not altogether opposed to entering into some sort of contact with the other. Human curiosity and our natural instincts towards socialization and communication (with or without mutual expectations of profit) usually provide most individuals with a basic and inborn readiness for new contacts. One may try to avoid contact, of course, by shunning, evading or ignoring other people, with the extreme options of choosing flight, isolation or exile.Beyond such direct and immediate contacts, one might talk of indirect contacts: such technologically restricted, sensually semi-amputated contacts are established through messengers or messages transported by media of all sorts (including letters, phone calls, newspapers, radio, television, and other modes of communication). Both messengers and messages of contact obviously need to reproduce sensory impressions in order to convey the reality of the contact indicated in the message. While auditory and visual sense impressions can be imitated quite well and are therefore privileged in the performance of literature and in the audio-visual media, the reproduction of tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sense impressions has remained technically more complicated, if not impossible. …