September 18, 2015 - 16:55
Alison
ESem Paper #3
September 18, 2015
Different Background and Slippage
My understanding of slippage is doing or saying something unconsciously, but causing an unwanted result by bringing up a subject that people don’t want to hear. Slippage is not always bad as it reveals the existing problems to us and makes people reflect about their behaviors and thoughts in the past. But it still has negative effects because it can make people feel uncomfortable. From my opinion, just as the “custom and conventions slow the pace of legal change,making abolition more difficult” (Dalke, Part I. “A form of thinking unfettered from its own intentions”), I personally believe that custom, convention or private habit are some of the most important reasons that cause slippage. By reading “The Art Of Contact Zone” and analyzing the students’ experience about the class, I concluded that slippage is mainly a result from different customs, conventions and backgrounds. As people have distinctive understandings towards the same things based on their differences in custom, conventions and backgrounds, the divergence in opinions may lead to some unconscious behaviors that have bad influences even though there are no negative intentions.
In “The Art Of Contact Zone”, the author describes a course that centered on the intersection of Americas and multiple cultural histories. The student body was highly diverse instead of a homogeneous community in this class, which created a contact zone where cultures could meet, crash and possibly grapple with each other. With the different backgrounds, all the students were “hearing their culture discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them; all the students saw their roots traced back to legacies of both glory and shame; all the students experienced face to face the ignorant and incomprehension, and occasionally, the hostility of others”. (Pratt, Art of the Contact Zone,Page 7 ) The experience of students in this class is exactly an example of slippage. The goal of the course is discussing the interaction of cultures academically that supposed to generate creative thoughts, but the students felt a series of passive emotions such as ignorance, incomprehension and even hostility.
Evidently, the different background and conventions are the main reason to cause this situation as the course was primarily designed to discuss the academic topic related to “national patrimony, cultural citizenship, and imagined community”. Although we cannot deny the positive results of this course: there were reflections, revelations, mutual understandings and thus created new wisdom, in this process, the students were exposed to an “unsafe” environment. Because the students grew up in their own way and in the specific environments, each of them cannot understand the weakness, the grief and the sensitive parts in others’ cultures. When they saw the same thing in different aspects, they just experienced the multiple emotions such as horrify and shock as the opinions they heard from their classmates contradicted their beliefs that they accumulated through their lives in the past. They experienced ignorance, discrimination or even hostility, and the shame originated in this process affect their self esteem. That could be harmful and frustrating when a person found that its established value system was destroyed as they just shifted from one kind of background and convention to another. It might take a long time to recover from this and move on. In this case, the reason to design this course is not intended to be baleful and harmful to students, however, it did have some relatively negative influences on them.
In sum, the example in “Art of the Contact Zone” just exemplifies that the customs and backgrounds are the important reason to cause slippage. What we say or do unconsciously, the opinion and belief that we want to protect can be something offensive for others. Besides that, what the slippage tells me is not only those differences can lead to subconscious but harmful effect, but also give me a hint when I get along with the people who have the different experience in the past. I know that I need to be careful talking about things related to culture, races and identity, and I should not impose my point of view on others. Because slippage possibly happens at every moment in the life, and it happens mutually: we never know when we will be offended by others because of the different opinions generated by the different background.
Mary Louise Pratt: Art of the Contact Zone. Modern Language Association (1991)
Anne Dalke: "Slipping into Something More (Un)Comfortable: Untangling Identity, Unsettling Community." DRAFT chapter for Steal This Classroom (2015)