Festival Contact Zones looks at an emergent area of literature related to Pratt’s (2008) definition of contact zones and the observations of festivals, events and exhibitions that take place within these spaces. The geographical coverage includes Cuba, Torres Strait Islands, Easter Islands, Canadian Rodeos and North American Museums. As mentioned in chapter three, Pratt’s (2008) definition of a contact zone is an
asymmetrical dominate and subordinate social space in which ‘disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other’ (p. 7). Contact zone spaces create what Pratt (2008) observes as a ‘transcultural phenomena’ (p. 7). According to Pratt (2008), a transcultural phenomena is the cultural selection and invitation by subjugated people who may not be able to control the transmission of what the ‘dominant culture visits upon them, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, how they use it, and what they make it mean’ (p. 7).
The term transculturation was coined by Cuban essayist and ethnomusicologist Fernando Ortiz in his 1947 publicationCuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Ortiz’s (1947) use of the term transculturation described the cultural convergence and emergence between Indigenous peoples, colonialism, slavery and immigrants during a period in Cuba’s evolution of complex ‘economic-social-phenomena’ (p. 97). Nakata (2005) observes in relation to the shaping and reshaping of transcultural contact zones
‘that music was one of the many cultural artifacts, which circulated in the Torres Strait along with its mobile and multicultural population’ (p. 13). Music, according to Nakata (2005) is a benign, portable artifact that is open to transcultural borrowings and adaptations. A South East Aboriginal Australian example of music being a portable, transcultural phenomena is provided by Broome (2005) in relation to Aboriginal creativity and how Aboriginal music has ‘blossomed as a new cultural creation drawing on diverse styles and Koori ideas’ (p. 388). Broome (2005) recognised these practices as being part of an ‘Aboriginal cultural renaissance’ (p. 390) that has extended into language and education whilst fuelling employment, pride and cultural production.
The Tapati Rapa Nui Festival held annually in January on the Easter Islands is considered by Dan Bendrups (2008) in Pacific Festivals As Dynamic Contact Zones: The Case of Tapati Rapa Nui to be a cultural festival contact zone space. Bendrups (2008) regards cultural festival contact zones as spaces ‘in which there are multiple layers of display, and where the boundaries between curator and visitor, or performer and audience are sometimes blurred’ (p. 17). Bendrups (2008) indicates that the festival is now far from just being a vehicle for constructing cultural identity and that successful local festivals have come to represent ‘social wellbeing and survival, especially for smaller islands or island groups’ (p. 14).
Bendrups (2008) outlines two key factors relating to the cultural prevalence of festivals in the Pacific, which are to do with the 1960s and 1970s decolonizing of Pacific Islands and their ‘mechanisms for establishing unique cultural and political identities’ (p. 18). Performative mediation, such as dance, marks Pacific Island
independence days and the creation of a regional performance framework had resulted from the establishing and institutionalizing of the 1972 Festival of Pacific Arts.
According to Bendrups (2008), the Festival of Pacific Arts ‘demonstrated that indigenous performing arts could be beneficial to economic, diplomatic and national development’ (p. 18). To this extent, festivals such as Tapati Rapa Nui and Festival of Pacific Arts are suggestive, by Bendrups accounts, of decolonizing themselves
through cultural diplomacy in order to potentially break down larger contact zone spaces.
Mary-Ellen Kelm (2007) notes in Riding into Place: Contact Zones, Rodeo, and Hybridity in the Canadian West 1900–1970, that rodeos are ‘suitable vessels for expression by marking out territories within the grand narrative of nation-building and operate at the micro-historical level’ (p. 109). Rodeo’s cross-cultural history of sport and performance became an appealing hybrid ‘to settlers as well as First Nations across the Canadian west’ (p. 111). Kelm (2007) states that ‘rodeos expressed community values, identity and history, and some settler towns saw the presence of Aboriginal people as integral to their sense of themselves’ (p. 117). What is indicated by Kelm is the reciprocated ownership of identity between Aboriginal people and settler towns, manifested through rodeos’ performative mediation and continuity of relationships.
Contemporary museum practices have been extensively written about. The link made in the literature review is based on the impacts of contact zone spaces as related to collaborating cultural relationships. James Clifford’s (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century, presents a number of museum collection case study examples dealing with contact zones, reciprocity and transculturation in his chapter “Museums as Contact Zones”. Clifford (1997) repositions Pratt’s notions of contact zones related to the European expansions of interior frontiers to the cultural relations within the regions of city centres.
Contact work in museums, according to Clifford (1997) is about going beyond discovery, negotiation, consultation and sensitivity towards an ‘active collaboration and a sharing of authority’ (p. 210). What Clifford (1997) suggests is that ‘contact zones are constituted through reciprocal movements of people, not just objects, messages, commodities, and money’ (p. 195). Clifford (1997) states that a contact perspective is about specifying local/global choices and struggles which concern ‘inclusion, integrity, dialogue, translation, quality and control’ (p. 214). The small pool of festival, rodeo and museum contact zone literature discussions as yet haven’t touched on their environmental impacts and how the environment maybe an added dimension to understanding festival contact zones.