Reading Culture: A Reconsideration of the Contact Zone. Language and Contact Zone
Reading Culture: A Reconsideration of the Contact Zone
At the beginning of the term, we referred to academic writing as entering a conversation. In their book, They Say/I Say, authors Graff and Birkenstein state that “In our view…the best academic writing has one underlying feature: it is deeply engaged in some way in other people’s views. Too often, however, academic writing is taught as a process of saying ‘true’ or ‘smart’ things in a vacuum, as if it were possible to argue effectively without being in conversation with someone else” (p 3). What the authors are attempting to make you aware of here is that each subject matter is argued about by a number of writers. In other words, in any subject area, there is some kind of conversation going on among scholars who write in that area. The conversation is the way academic subject matters establish criteria of truth; and, as a writer, you want to join a conversation that is established. Now that you have had some practice, it is time to join a conversation that discusses the criteria of truth regarding culture and contact zones in our contemporary world.Essay AssignmentProbably the most difficult word to define in Pratt’s article is her use of the word culture. In Lippi-Green’s chapter, the author also explores this term by examining the language choices made by Disney film makers in regards to the unconscious message of discrimination they may be teaching our children. She is concerned about how we see and read images, how language is used, and how the images and language we are exposed to are often controlled by money and power. Just as Pratt questions the loss to society of Spain’s locking away of Poma’s text for 350 years and as Anzaldua questions the status quo when it comes to writing and language use, Lippi Green, as well as Anzaldua and Wong Fillmore, question how readers and filmgoers should pay a different kind of attention to the images and sounds around them.For this paper, you will make an argument about some aspect of culture that appears to represent or introduce a kind of contact zone. Focus your work on an aspect of visual media (ads, art, film, or television) and the language choices made by the film maker(s). Find a form of media which you can analyze in terms of the history of the media, social significance, its effect on a particular population, the meanings behind the media, or aspects that speak to you. Incorporate the vocabulary of Pratt that we spent time learning Contact Zone, Culture, Autoethnography, Transculturation. Lippi Green argues that Disney is selling much more story telling and has a significant effect on us culturally, psychologically, emotionally, economically, and politically; Anzaldua argues the same in reference to the kind of language and books we expose students to in school. Are they off-base, too extreme, or do you find images and language which challenge the purpose for which we are told they exist?To Help You Write This EssayHere’s what you need to bear in mind when you begin to plan your research essay:1. You must select an argument (claim) regarding the issue of language and contact zone, making use of the ideas and vocabulary we discussed this term, an argument that touches on an issue that you have ideas of your own to advance.2. You must find some form of media, such as a film, which you will use to illustrate the points you will make in your argument.3. You must also find at least one piece of SCHOLARSHIP which help you make your claim and/or illustrate an opposite view of your argument.4. Use your Formal Sentence Outline Exercise as steps in the process of creating a well formed, fully supported, academic argument.5. Review what your learned in They Say/I Say.6. Your final draft should be 7-8 pages. You must also include a separate page at the end of your paper with your Works Cited list, which will include the readings you used, the scholarly article you found, and your piece of media you are using as examples/evidence. Your Works Cited page does NOT count toward the 7-8 –page count.Submission Requirements:• Please follow MLA formatting for your essay layout, required elements, and reference formats.• Please upload Draft 1 of your essay to TurnItIn.psu.edu no later than 11:59 pm on Tuesday, November 19. • Please also bring a printed copy of Draft 1 to class on Wednesday, November 20. • Your copy should be double-spaced, printed on one-side only, with pages stapled together. • You will share your draft with a peer who will give you some concrete feedback on which you will work to incorporate for your second draft. • Draft 2/Conferences:o Between December 6-13, we will not meet as a class, but I will meet with each of you during the week to work in detail on your research paper. o A sign-up sheet will be distributed in class. When you sign up for a time, please make note of your scheduled conference. You are responsible for knowing when you are to come to my office. o If you miss your conference, it will count as 3 absences, as the conference is taking the place of our class meetings.
Instructor’s Name:
Couse + Code:
Submission Date:
Language and Contact Zone
Studies in postcolonial history critique how American and European colonizers established the asymmetry of power in what they regarded as developing cultural identities of non-European countries. This was contrary to a widely accepted concept in the discipline of social sciences that links a person's language to their identity. According to this belief, the duo is so much connected so that corruption of, say, language, drastically affects a peoples' culture. During the 19th century, colonizers emphasized the need to adopt Western culture by reiterating the definition and confining the non-European countries to a socialized reiteration of otherness, which is a technique that naturalizes the behavior of colonizers at the expense of the culture of the colonized. The essay seeks to explore how language and contact zones influence the diversification of cultural beliefs. The paper also explores how contact zones change the scope and direction of understanding national identities as well as explaining the effects of traits on lingual-cultural identities concerning Rosinna Lippi-Green's 1997 article "Teaching Children How to Discriminate: What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf."
One of the significant themes that Lippi-Green highlights is the stereotype exhibited to American listeners through television shows and films; this entails how generalizations are introduced and why they, at any rate, appear to be valuable in the television and movie industry (Lippi-Green 125). Lippi-Green also classifies her research with an assessment of Disney animated characters who speak a rendition of Standard English, which is unrelated to those characters who talk with accentuated English. In this study, Lippi-Green is worried that kids figure out how to socially stereotype nonstandard English speakers, all things considered, from vivified films made for kids, while, at the same time, considering these to be surprising English talkers as being different through phonetic varieties that happen to stray from the ideologically standard culture (Lippi-Green 112).
Moreover, Lippi-Green is concerned that, although Disney is playing a central role in educating and exposing children to diverse cultural practices, its animated movies also teach them how to stereotype and categorize, as well as belittling nonstandard English speakers (Lippi-Green, 123). Hence, given the findings mentioned above, which is additionally fleshed out in this paper, I concur with most of Lippi-Green's conclusions. Besides, she seems to have underlying reasons behind her concerns. She notes that kids will learn the language and its reasonable qualifications, for example, facial expression, intonations, breathe, and pause with or without being exposed to televisions and films, just from affiliation and mingling with more distant family members, such as companions (Lippi-Green 117).
Similarly, Heider claims that with or without films, children mark the variations in emphasized English and notice the level of their social acknowledgment by the elders around them. In this way, kids are beneficiaries of our social qualities and language use through these windows to the world, whi...
You Might Also Like Other Topics Related to stereotyping:
- Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination against Women5 pages/≈1375 words | APA | Psychology | Essay |
- Liberal and Conservative solutions to solve race problems2 pages/≈550 words | APA | Literature & Language | Essay |
- Decoding and Encoding Problem in a Self-Managed Group1 page/≈275 words | APA | Communications & Media | Essay |
- Making the world a little more open2 pages/≈550 words | APA | Business & Marketing | Case Study |
- Hidden Figures Movie. Annotated Bibliography Paper4 pages/≈1100 words | MLA | Literature & Language | Annotated Bibliography |
- Effects of Niqab Ban on Court Decisions and Witness Testimonies 6 pages/≈1650 words | MLA | Social Sciences | Essay |
- Intersectionality. Exam Two Explore the topic of intersectionality2 pages/≈550 words | MLA | Literature & Language | Essay |