--Mary Louise Pratt, from "Introduction" to Imperial Eyes (1992)

1. Redundancy, discontinuity, and unreality. These are some of the chief coordinates of the text of Euroimperialism, the stuff of its power to constitute the everyday with neutrality, spontaneity, numbing repetition [. . . .] In recent years that power has become open to question and subject to scrutiny in the academy, as part of a large-scale effort to decolonize knowledge. [. . .] For one of the things it brings most forcefully into play are contestatory expressions from the site of imperial intervention, long ignored in the metropolis; the critique of empire coded ongoingly on the spot, in ceremony, dance, parody, philosophy, counterknowledge and counterhistory, in texts unwitnessed, suppressed, lost, or simply overlain with repetition and unreality. It calls for the story of another letter.

2. In 1905 a Peruvianist named Richard Pietschmann [. . .] came across a manuscript he had never seen before. It was dated in Cuzco in the year 1613, some four decades after the final fall of the Inca Empire to the Spanish, and signed with an unmistakably Amerindian, Andean name: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. (Guaman in Quechua [major language of the Incas[ means "falcon" and pomo means "leopard.") Written in a mixture of Quechua and rough, ungrammatical Spanish, the manuscript was a letter addressed by this unknown Andean to King Philip III of Spain. What stunned Pietschmann was that the letter was twelve hundred pages long [and contained four hundred illustrations. . . .] The manuscript proposed nothing less than a new view of the world. It began by rewriting the history of Christendom to include the indigenous peoples of America, then went on to describe in great detail the history and lifeways of the Andean peoples and their leaders. This was followed by a revisionist account of the Spanish conquest, and hundreds of pages documenting and denouncing Spanish exploitation and abuse. [. . . ] Guaman Poma's letter ends with a mock interview in which he advises the king as to his responsibilities, and proposes a new form of government through collaboration of Andean and Spanish elites.

3. [. . .] It was not until the late 1970s, as positivist reading habits gave way to postcolonial pluralisms, that Guaman Poma's text began to be read as the extraordinary intercultural tour de force that it was.

4. To be read, and to be readable. The readability of Guaman Poma's letter today is another sign of the changing intellectual dynamics through which colonial meaning-making has become a subject of critical investigation. His elaborate intercultural text and its tragic history [apparently, being ignored] exemplify the possibilities and perils of writing in what I like to call "contact zones," social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often as highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination - like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.

5. [Later, Pratt explains one of her key terms, 'transculturation.'] Ethnographers have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for. Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone. [. . . ] While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery (in the emanating glow of the civilizing mission or the cash flow of development), it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis - beginning, perhaps, with the latter's obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself.

6. [Next, Pratt more fully explains "the contact zone."] I use [it] to refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space 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. I borrow the term "contact" here from its use in linguistics, where the term contact language refers to improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native language who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade. Such languages begin as pidgins, and are called creoles when they come to have native speakers of their own. Like the societies of the contact zone, such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure. [. . .] "Contact zone" in my discussion is often synonymous with "colonial frontier." But while the latter term is grounded within a European expansionist perspective (the frontier is a frontier only with respect to Europe), "contact zone" is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term "contact," I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A "contact" perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and "travelees," not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.