In a 1991 keynote address to the Modern Language Association titled "Arts of the Contact Zone", Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept, saying "I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today".
[3] In "Arts of the Contact Zone", [1] Pratt describes a manuscript from 1613 penned by Andean man named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.
[1] Pratt also shares the example of Poma's New Chronicle to give an example of "transculturation" or a term that ethnographers have used "to describe the process whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant metropolitan culture".
[1] Pratt states that one of the purposes of the contact zone is "intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication and culture that gets done in the academy".
The contact zone has been used outside of its original spatial concept to describe connections between identity groups that are interacting outside of a specific, local, physical space.
[6] James Clifford applies the notion of contact zone to the museum studies in his book "Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century" (1997).
He states, "When museums are seen as contact zones, their organising structure as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship -- a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull.
He states, "on one hand, I welcome the new collaboration, and, on the other, I raise a serious concern that the neocolonial nature of these contact zones could destroy the very empowerment that it is meant to engender.