Revising the ‘Contact Zone’: William Adams, Reception History and the Opening of Japan, 1600–1860

Abstract

Few concepts have had an impact on the study of European travel writing comparable to Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the ‘contact zone’, outlined in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). This term, previously used to describe the formation of pidgin and creole languages through linguistic interactions, is adapted by Pratt to designate ‘the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’. 1 As James Clifford recognized in an early review, the ‘contact zone’ refocuses our attention away from travel as an individual process of mapping and discovery, towards an awareness of European interactions with ‘established routes and relationships, indigenous and colonial’. 2 The ‘“contact” perspective’, Pratt argues, ‘emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other’: it emphasizes ‘co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power’. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.