In her path-breaking book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt introduced the resonant term "contact zones," which she defined as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination-like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (4). In the past ten years, the explosion of work across the disciplines on contact zones, borderlands, transculturation, migrations, cultural and commercial traffic, and the various forms of resulting hybridity, métissage, mestizaje, and créolité has developed the term far beyond her original formulation. Interactions between global and local, transnational and national, identity and difference, conjuncturalism and identity politics, space and time have become important areas of research as the study of culture, society, and power has become increasingly comparative, historical, and global in scope. We are fortunate to have Professor Pratt come to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Brittingham Distinguished Professor during the week of April 2-6 under the sponsorship of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle. The conference on The "Contact Zone" Revisited that concludes her visit returns to the questions she originally raised and to the various dimensions and politics of the study of intercultural interactions, broadly defined.

In particular, we ask how various kinds of contact zones in the past, present, or future constitute spaces of violence, reconciliation, and/or co-existence. What kinds of violence? Who are its perpetrators and victims? What are its causes? What kinds of reconciliation? What are its processes? Who benefits? How lasting can it be? Does it cover up or insist on forgetting the past in the interests of the future? Or does it suggest that the future depends upon working through the effects or changing the structures of the past? What kinds of co-existence are possible? What changes make it likely? How does it relate to the needs for social justice or resistance to it?

THURSDAY, APRIL 5

Opening Remarks 7:15 p.m
Susan Stanford Friedman

Opening Address , 7:30-9:00 p.m.

Mary Louise Pratt
Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Brittingham Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Killer Bees to Stolen Kidneys: Thoughts on Mobility and Globality"

Moderator: Mary N. Layoun

Reception 9:00-9:30 p.m.

FRIDAY, APRIL 6

Media and the Contact Zone , 10:00-11:30 a.m.
Moderator: Kenneth M. George

Shanti Kumar , Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Creative Solutions to Ayodhya?: Representations of Violence and the Violence of Representations in India Today"
Leigh Payne , Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Making Heroes and Villains: Torturers' Confessions and the Media in South Africa, Argentina, and Chile"
Lewis Leavitt , Pediatrics & Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Crossing Sesame Street: Palestinian and Israeli Children Meet"

Bodies in the Contact Zone , 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Moderator: Kathryn Sanchez

Anne McClintock , English & Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Unprotected in the Contact Zone: Sexwork, HIV/AIDS, and the Law"
Hawley Fogg-Davis , Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Familial Lines: Navigating Racial Meaning in Adoption"

Landscapes of Identity in the Borderlands , 1:45-2:45 p.m.
Moderator: Francisco Ortega

Hong Jiang , Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Modernization, Culture, and Landscape Change on a Mongolian-Chinese Borderland"
Rubén Medina , Spanish and Portuguese & Chicana/o Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Nomadic Subjects and Transnational Space in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek"

Keynote Address , 3:00-4:15 p.m.

Renato Rosaldo
Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University
"Cultural Citizenship and the Politics of Privilege"

Moderator: Kirin Narayan

Coordinated Event , 4:30-5:45 p.m., 1100 Grainger

Dr. Nawal el Saadawi
"Women's Dissidence, Creativity, and Mental Health"

Summary Discussion, 6:00-7:00 p.m.
Moderators: Chris Chekuri, Kristin Pitt, & Rebecca Walsh
An open discussion with speakers, panelists, and conference attendees.

Dinner, 7:30 p.m.
At Wilson Street Grill, 217 S. Hamilton Street.
Pay-Your-Own-Way.
Everyone welcome, but Reservations Required.

Featured Speakers

MARY LOUISE PRATT is Olive H. Palmer Chair in Humanities and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her work Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992) introduced and elaborated on the term "contact zone" from which we take the title of the conference. Her research and teaching interests are wide-ranging, from culture and citizenship to women and print culture to linguistics. Professor Pratt's other publications include the co-authored Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (1990) and Linguistics for Students of Literature (1980). Among her forthcoming publications are Mujer y ciudadanía: historia de discursos, 1820-1997/Gender and Citizenship: Latin American Women Engage the Nation, 1820-1997 and In This Together , co-authored with Renato Rosaldo.

RENATO ROSALDO is Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. Among his publications are the widely influential Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989), now translated into Spanish and Japanese; Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History (1980); and the co-edited works The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800 (1982) and Creativity/Anthropology (1993). His field experience includes research among the Ilongots of northern Luzon, Philippines; work in Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico; and, from 1990 to 1995, research on cultural citizenship in San Jose, California. His forthcoming publications include Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy and a volume he has edited, Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia .

NAWAL EL SAADAWI is an internationally-renowned writer, psychiatrist, and women's health activist. One of the most widely translated contemporary Egyptian writers, she has published over 30 books, including the novel Woman at Point Zero , the autobiographical Daughter of Isis , and the groundbreaking Hidden Face of Eve (1977), covering violence against women and girls, female genital cutting, prostitution, sexual relationships, marriage, divorce and Islamic fundamentalism. Imprisoned in 1981 for her protests against President Sadat's policies toward women, she formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association upon release. She is also founder of the African Association for Women on Research Development, founder of the Egyptian Women Writer's Association, co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights, and was the UN Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa and Middle East, 1978-1980.

Panelists

HAWLEY FOGG-DAVIS is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of The Ethics of Transracial Adoption , forthcoming from Cornell University Press in November 2001. Her research and teaching interests include the philosophy of race and racial identity, the political morality of race-based decision-making in adoption and reproductive rights, and antidiscrimination law.

HONG JIANG is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the monograph The Ordos Plateau of China and a number of articles on regional human-environmental issues. A cultural geographer whose interests fall in the broad area of the nature-culture relationship, she has done extensive work in Inner Mongolia, China. Her current research investigates the relationship between cultural change and landscape change on the Chinese-Mongolian borderland.

SHANTI KUMAR is Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current research on satellite television in India, with a focus on issues of global, national and local flows of media products in popular culture, has him at work on two book projects, one on the discourse of Indian television in terms of the recent emergence of satellite networks in the 1990s, and the other a co-edited anthology on global television.

LEWIS LEAVITT is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Medical Director and Coordinator of the Social and Affective Processes Research Unit at the Waisman Center on Human Development and Mental Retardation. His research involves early social and communicative development, and the psychological effects of exposure to violence in children. His recent publications include the edited books Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children , Improving Communication in Children with Down Syndrome and The Role of Early Experience in Development .

ANNE MCCLINTOCK is the Simone de Beauvoir Professor in English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), and co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997). She is currently at work on two texts on the sex industry in transnational context, Skin Hunger: A Chronicle of the Sex Industr y and Screwing the System: Gender and the Sex Industry .

RUBÉN MEDINA is Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Chicano/a Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Autor, autoridad y autorizacion: Escritura y poetica de Octavio Paz (1999) as well as two books of poetry, Bailame este viento, Mariana (1980) and Amor de Lejos ... Fools' Love (1986). His research in Mexican and Chicano/a literature and culture focuses on canonical and non-canonical writers, intellectual history, film studies, and Mexican migration to the United States.

LEIGH PAYNE is Associate Professor of Political Science, director of the Global Studies Program, and coordinator of the Legacies of Authoritarianism Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Uncivil Movements: The Armed Right Wing and Democracy in Latin America (2000) and Brazilian Industrialists and Democratic Change (1994), and coeditor, with Ernest Bartell, of Business and Democracy in Latin America (1995). Her current research is titled Unsettling Accounts and deals with the political impact of confessions made by torturers in Latin America, South Africa, Bosnia and Rwanda.

Conference Coordinator: Susan Stanford Friedman
Brittingham Coordinator: Mary Layoun
Contact Person: Kristin Pitt

Sponsored by The Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle
and co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the International Institute, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the Brittingham Fund.

We are grateful to the all the co-sponsors of Nawal el Saadawi's lecture:
The Women & Citizenship Research Circle, Middle East Studies Program, Women's Studies Program and Research Center,
Department of Comparative Literature, African Studies Program, National Center of Excellence in Women's Health (UW Medical School), University Lectures Committee, and the Humanistic Fund.