I chose this photo because I think it exemplifies my understanding of cultural contact and hybridity. The individual in the photo is composed of multiple identities, most or all of which live in a digital contact zone community of other hybrid individuals, all under the blessing--and watchful eye--of capitalism. The photo itself is taken from a conference paper on marketing to individuals/communities with hybrid identities.

Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" has significant similarities to our .ppt presentation from last week. Guaman Poma's "New Chronicle" demonstrates and elaborates on the idea of hybridity we discussed as part of contrastive rhetoric; Poma plays both the Spanish and the Quechua "cards" in his hefty treatise, but also uses visual rhetoric to incorporate different cultural rhetorics (Pratt 2-3). However, Pratt also notes that power and authority play just as significant a role as hybridity in defining the contact zone. The contrast between Poma's treatise and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's canon, Royal Commentaries of the Incas is not so much one of style or rhetoric--well, not quite--but one of authority. De la Vega, unlike Poma, writes in the prestige language of the empire, and does so without the narrowest hint of hybridity. To reference this to the "Dogs Playing Poker" painting from the presentation, de la Vega was only playing the King and Queen cards; hence his work's inclusion in the canon of Spanish studies.

Authority and its use in pedagogy comes into greater recognition in Kaplan's "Foreword: What in the World is Contrastive Rhetoric?" Like de la Vega's use of only the authoritative dialect/genre in his work, writing teachers often only recognize that which is written in SASE and authority genres. His example of a cooking recipe sonnet provides an excellent example of the problem: while it would be a wonderful example of creativity, hybridity, and possibly even parody of authority, if a student were to turn one in for a sonnet-writing assignment most poetry or literature teachers would probably be offended.

As teachers of writing, we have a choice (for now) between teaching in a monoculture (real or imagined) or doing away with some of the authority and simplicity that a monoculture offers. If we choose monoculture, we risk becoming as alienating and damaging as Ruby Payne; if we choose hybridity, then condemn ourselves to a deluge of painful questions. Perhaps 'condemn' is not the right word for those of us who delight in these new paradigms, but they're certainly not easy to answer or explain, and even Kaplan calls them "terrible questions." Of course, the reality is that monocultural, monolingual, monodialectical teaching simply won't be an option for very much longer, which makes the choice between monoculture and hybridity not really a choice at all.