Bizzell's article, Opinion: "Contact Zones" and English Studies, is readable at JSTOR.
Bizzell states that "We would, in effect, be reading all the texts as brought to the contact zone, for the purpose of communicating across cultural boundaries (167)". She continues to explain how we can meet the demand that makes the reader encounter the experience of others through the activities of reading and writing as follows: "The abilities needed both to enter literary studies and to refine one's own writing would be the skills of analyzing and imitating rhetorical arts of the contact zone. Students would learn to critique strategies of negotiating difference in the writing of others and to practice them in their own(169)".
Her statements are agreeable to pursue the goal. However, I have to pose the question of how the subordinate culture overcome the dominant culture to maintain or achieve autonomous thought, for I observe the potential issue underlying in the reading in the contact zone. I think that the purpose of reading and the result gained through reading would be different between the people who are involved and the people who are not involved in the contact zone where the text offers.
If the readers are not involved there, the biggest problem might be that it is unable for them to ensure the external viewpoint over a contact zone. Reading a text is a certain kind of cultural practice of interpreting the meaning of a text, and it includes the whole process of which readers form the image in their mind. On the process of reading the text, the readers will shape
their interpretation in their mind. However, when the readers are not involved in the contact zone related to the text, the secondary text produced in their mind might have nowhere to belong, because they don't know the possibility of how it is applicable in the tension which offers unstable situation. On the other hand, the readers who are involved in the contact zone relate to their reading have to pose another question about how the mode of their interpretation has been installed, and how their comprehension was produced by their reading; because the reflexivity for their reading is not established autonomously, but it is rather brought by contact with other elements: People, environment, socio-economic cultural backdrop, and so on.
Therefore, in both cases, the reading in a contact zone shows the situation that the comprehension of reading which readers are going to install and apply cannot finish maintaining its leadership in the process of defining the meaning of the text. It doesn't mean that a major procedure or framework of interpretation isn't applicable. It means that the element which cannot fit into the frame of the prediction continuously emerges, and shakes the interpretation that is establishing; thus, the reader's way of reading is always unstable in the tension between a reader and a text. As a result, the readers will be entrapped to the situation that they cannot develop their own strategy for reading autonomously on the process of reading. It contains a potential problem that the readers are put into a position that their reading is under the heteronomous control.
