ABSTRACT
Even though the establishment of transcultural studies as a school of thought in the humanities is a relatively recent development, its basic outlook and approach have an illustrious ancestry. 1 Among the formative notions arising out of postcolonialism, Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone has been particularly influential in historical research. The concept of the contact zone was first introduced in her keynote address delivered in 1990 at a conference of the Modern Language Association (MLA), which was published one year later in the MLA’s journal, Profession. At the 2015 meeting of the Working Group for Early Modern History in the Association of German Historians in Heidelberg, the metaphor of the contact zone was the most frequently invoked image in discussions of cultural encounter and exchange. At the same time, for all the care which presenters took to critically engage with their categories, few reflected on this particular concept, the assumptions it carries with it, and its applicability to diverse sets of contexts from colonial South America to modern East Asia. 2
