In contact zones, thus learning is never one sided -- both Whites and Blacks learn from Jamal's presence at the school.
Pratt notes of her own experiences in such contact zones of academia, that "the fact that no one was safe" in some areas, "made all of us involved in the course appreciate the importance of what we came to call safe houses," or "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. Jamal has no such a 'safe house' in the school. However, despite Pratt's assertion that a multicultural curricula or ethnic or women's studies provides such safe houses, the film provokes one to doubt that such insulation is ever really possible. In the persona of Forrester, the writer played by Sean Connery who Jamal befriends, Jamal meets a writer and an eccentric who has attempted to entirely isolate himself from society. But no such safety is truly possible, even for the most brilliant artist, for society...
Just as the Incans could not remain a pure culture after the intrusive presence of conquistadors from Spain, so Forrester cannot remain aloof and excluded from the world in the presence of the persona of Jamal.
The two entirely different individuals engage in what Pratt calls "healing and mutual recognition," not through safe houses but through active engagement with contact zones and transgressing their personal comfort zones. Only through contact and conflict, whether intellectual or academic, the film suggests, can individuals truly construct shared understandings, knowledge and claims on the world -- in safe houses such ferment cannot exist.
Works Cited
Finding Forrester." Directed by Gus Van Zandt. 1999.
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone. "From Ways of Reading, 5th edition, ed. David Bartholomew and Anthony Petroksky. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.
