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Aims of the Assignment
This assignment aims to get you to pay sustained, considered attention to how others see you and to how you position yourself as a person, a student, a speaker, a reader, a listener and, most of all, a writer. It also offers you the opportunity to write in modes and genres other than the usual school essay.
The Assignment
You can extend the project of Pratt�s �Arts of the Contact Zone� by writing an auto-ethnography. It should not be too hard to locate a setting or context in which you are the �other��the one who speaks from outside rather than inside a privileged discourse. Pratt says that the position of the outsider is marked not only by differences of language and ways of speaking, but also by differences in power, authority, status. In a sense, she argues, the only way those in power can understand you is in their terms. These are terms you will need to use to tell your story, but your goal is to describe your position in ways that �engage with representations others have made of [you]� without giving in or giving up or disappearing in their already formed sense of who you are.
This is an interesting challenge. One of the things that will make the writing difficult is that the auto-ethnographic or transcultural text calls upon skills not usually valued in American classrooms: bilingualism, parody, code-shifting, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression, story-telling, unseemly comparisons of high and low cultural forms�these are some of the terms Pratt offers. These do not fit easily with the traditional genres of the writing class (unity, consistency, sincerity, clarity, correctness, decorum).
You ought to take this writing through several drafts. It might be best to begin as Pratt�s student, using her description as a preliminary guide. Once you get a sense of your own project, you may find that you have terms or examples to add to her list of the literate arts of the contact zone.
In investigating yourself as �other,� you should spend some time learning more about what has been written and said about you and the people who describe you, both by people like you and by people unlike you. There should be a substantial list of works cited with this paper (ten items seems right), not all of which are purely web sources.
In the course of this auto-ethnography, you should devote some attention to what implications your self-description has for how you think about, enter into, and respond to public controversies.
How to Do the Writing
As soon as possible, you should begin doing informal writing of all kinds investigating this topic. The first writing ought to explore the identities that you claim for yourself, or that are put on you by others, and how you think about those identities. We will do some of this writing in class. You should do more at home.
As and after you select your topic, do research on the group(s) you engage in your writing.
You should organize your thoughts and produce a draft, ideally one substantially longer than your final version.
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