Imagined Frontiers

“A frontier,” Carl Abbott proclaims in Imagined Frontiers, “is an edge—a line on a map and the territories and communities that surround that line.” (3) From this definition, Abbott explores the ways that visions of frontiers—whether in South Florida, Portland, Oregon, or even the planet Mars—have shaped American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Though he acknowledges scholarly critiques of the frontier concept, he argues that it remains “useful precisely because it has so many nested or overlapping meanings that artists can play with in different ways” (3). For Abbott, though frontiers are marked on maps, their real power lies in the way that people use them to mark differences, understand connections between place and self, and imagine new possibilities. Accordingly, the frontiers crossed here are not simply geographic but personal, intellectual, and temporal; they divide not just east from west, but also self from society, academic from creative, past from future, and history from myth.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Frontier · Mythology · Power (physics) · Sociology · Vision · American Environmental and Regional History · Anthropology · History · Philosophy