Mary Louise Pratt Edward Said
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The key tools to maintaining your identity
There are many tools that one can use to maintain their identity, nationally and internationally. A nation or land is where people have established their life, their culture and their heart; sadly it has happened where people have been forced out of their homeland. Great opening sentences. Mary Louise Pratt, Kenji Yoshino and Edward Said all present very good methods of maintaining ones national identity in their essays. In Mary Louise Pratts essay Arts of the Contact Zone she gives examples of people who are in a contact zone. Contact zones are where people are meeting other cultures, and they have to remember not to lose their own. (this was a run-on so I made it into two senteces)One of the Arts of the contact zone that describes what has happened with the Palestinians is Transculturation. Good. Transculturation is the combining of two different cultures. The Palestinians have been spread all over the world, and have had to take on the ways of their surroundings to fit into the norm while still keeping ways of their culture with them. In Kenji Yoshinos essay Covering the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, Yoshino is trying to stop people from showing their false selves, also known as covering. “Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” (Yoshino Preface) Edward Saids essay is a tool in itself; the essays purpose is to show the world what happened to the Palestinians and to stop this from happening again. Great sentence structure and point! “Just as we once were taken from one “habitat” to a new one, we can be moved again”. (Said 614) (move the sentence below that starts the next paragraph and make it the last sentence of this paragraph. This seems like your thesis statement, and the main point you are making in your paper)
All these authors provide many different tools to help maintain ones national identity. For Mary Louise Pratt her main tools are what she calls “literary arts of the contact zone”. Assimilation is one of the biggest tools (I wouldnt call assimilation a tool – it is a phenomenon) that will cause you (avoid using “you”) to lose your identity, so the key to not losing your identity is to not assimilate. If Pratt had a say in what was happening to the Palestines in Edward Saids essay, I believe Pratt would encourage the Palestinians to find safe houses. Superb connection! This part of the quote doesnt quite fit, I would start the quote here, and set it up by saying that Pratt uses the concept of safe houses as “social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression”. (Pratt) A safe house is somewhere you (avoid you)can go to feel safe, where you will be surrounded by people just like yourself.
Another one of Pratts Arts of the Contact Zone is also a key in maintaining your national identity is Transculturation. Transculturation is the combining of two cultures or traits from two different cultures. This can help in maintaining national identity by having the cultures meet half way, instead of conforming and letting your identity slip away from you. Here, pull an example of transculturation from Saids text. For instance, the use of the Mercedes. Even though Said describes it in negative terms, the use of the Mercedes has come in handy for Palestinians. This is just a suggestion, you may find another example.
Make this a new paragraph: An additional tool would be an autoethnographic text. “Guaman Pomas New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed to call an autoethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.” (Pratt L 56-57) States essay is also what we would call an autoethnographic text, in that