Bizzell's "'Contact Zones' and English Studies"

Bizzell makes a great case for reorganizing English Studies in terms of contact zones. Her article reminded me of Dr. Hernandez's English 500 class in which we studied Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands. The gist is pretty much the same: looking in depth at points where two or more cultures meet and clash. In this case it was the border between southern Texas and Mexico. At the time (almost 3 years ago and at the very beginning of my program) I could not really see how such a class was meant to introduce me to graduate level English, especially since almost half of Borderlands is written in Spanish. I was confused and a bit frustrated that I wasn't learning about typical English literature. Since then I have learned the value of authors like Anzaldua for the struggles and border-straddling they write about. Bizzell's article sums up why such a class is important to the future of English Studies. If we were to follow her suggestion and teach bearing contact zones in mind, "the attempt would be to show how each group [represents] itself imaginatively in relation to the others. We would, in effect, be reading all the texts as brought to the contact zone, for the purpose of communicating across cultural boundaries" (167). More communication, and different ways to communicate, are what I believe Bizzell is advocating for in this text. I don't see any reason why this could be a bad thing in a world where so many contact zones appear and where so many borders collide with one another. Plus, Bizzell's suggestion would mean a renewed interest in rhetoric. "[This] approach fully integrates  composition and rhetoric into literary studies. Studying texts as they respond to contact zone conditions is studying them rhetorically, studying them as efforts of rhetoric. The historical context provides a way to focus the rhetorical analysis" (168). I believe this would be extremely beneficial for schools to incorporate.