The Essential Call to Oppose Essentialism

In reading Pratt’s article, I was taken back to my youth. In some distant time, I too was a big baseball card collector. A collecting phenomenon typically engrosses the collector in a discourse community that maintains a healthy form of exclusive (to preserve the community) and inclusive (to broaden the community) behavior. My favorite team was the Chicago Cubs and I bought several books on Cub lore and Chicago history. The Windy City would have never caught my attention otherwise. I yearned to incorporate this knowledge I was acquiring of not only trading and stats but history into my writing as an elementary and junior high student. And I too was disappointed when the educational system separated baseball card collecting from reading, writing and arithmetic. Card collecting was a hobby—it was play time; and when the bell rings those two shall divorce. I can still hear the teacher say: “don’t bring those baseball cards to class. If you do, I will put them in my desk drawer until June.”

In the American-Western culture that I am accustomed to, it doesn’t seem like contact zones want to be tolerated. We want to segregate and let few voices speak. Let’s taxonomize and then make sure that these zones don’t touch. Yet, contact zones seem unavoidable. There is such a natural tendency to nurture “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” in educational systems, though the scientific method has taught us to dissect instead of teaching dialectics (Pratt 2). We have seen countless examples, including Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle, of cultures and languages evolving, meshing, melding. Contact zones are inescapable, and seem foolish to resist. I guess this resistance proves the existence of hegemony. Hegemony isn’t just some ethereal theory that conveniently works into Marxist thought; it is prevalent in squelching what occurs natural in communities and language. I would assume many Structuralists would understand English-only legislation as hegemony manufacturing a certain status quo that opposes what naturally occurs in language. I mean, no language is isolated: English is not a pure bred language by any means. But many insist that we take the ‘easy’ way of creating one national language as an attempt to phase out other languages in education. Good luck.

Such a resistance of contact zones exists to the point where essentialism is embraced. Much of what Holliday, Hyde and Kullman discuss in Intercultural Communication is resisting an ‘easy’ approach to communication, one that assumes that everyone communicates the same way. Of course, this essentialist attitude encrypts what is really going on in this mentality: a imperialistic view that everyone should think the way a dominant culture thinks. Ultimately, essentialism saddens me because it is an attempt to not only segregate and squelch community but it blatantly contests any notions of individual identity. I like the way Holliday, Hyde and Kullman discuss it: “we are all, as individuals, members of a vast number of different cultural groups [. . .], and hence have multiplicity of identities” (17). This gets back to how contact zones are unavoidable—involvement in several communities is inevitable (unless you choose to obtain from communities), and this involvement molds ones identity.

Contrastive Rhetoric comes into the picture when these varied identities, communities, and cultures need to be recognized instead of essentialized. Panetta notes in her article within Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited and Redefined that it is a daunting task to understand all of the varied forms contrastive rhetoric (in fact, I would say it is impossible). The point, however, is not to understand every contrastive rhetoric; the point is to recognize that the dominant discourse is not the only discourse.