A more modern example of Mary Louise Pratt's essay is the movie "The Help." This is a 2012 film that addresses the issue of black oppression that existed in the United States of America prior to years that led to Martin Luther King's march in the 1960's. The story talks of a young white woman, Eugenia, who has a close relationship with her black maid. She develops the need to tell the story of the oppressed maids in her state. Eugenia, who is a journalist, decides to write a book about the personal experiences that the black maids undergo at the hands of their white bosses. This film is a good reflection of what Pratt expresses as the relationship between that the oppressors and the oppressed (The Help, 2012).
Compared with Mary Louise Pratt's essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," addresses the impact that contact zones have on our society. Contact zones in the essay are used to mean areas in which different cultures interact. She writes about the impact that these contact zones have on both cultures and individuals. In the article, she uses words like "autoethnography" which means a reflection of a person's personal experience that is compared with what society thinks of the position. She writes that contact zones can be beneficial in one sense because in cases like classrooms, people from different cultures get an opportunity to interact with each other. Such a classroom can serve as a learning opportunity where students will learn about the different cultures in the classroom and this will have a positive effect, as it will lead to a global understanding of different cultures and tolerance. (Pratt, 1991).
Pratt also notes that contact zones can have a negative effect in that they promote evils like colonialism and slavery. She talks about the asymmetrical power between the oppressor and the oppressed, with the oppressor being the colonizer and the oppressed being the slave.
