presented at NACIS 2006 Annual Meeting
The North American Cartographic Information Society

ABSTRACT

PROXY Frontier .  Deborah Natsios

America’s Cold War imagination was profoundly invested in the contested space of its 3rd world client states.

The maps of “Proxy Frontier” track the post-WWII American frontiers that emerged in Greece, Korea and Vietnam - three key proxy states in which the Cold War’s hot war consequences were played out.

Historian Frederic Jackson Turner had asserted in 1893 that “frontier expansion created American Democracy.” What came to be exalted as the Turner Thesis provoked a half century of historiographic debate about the continental expansion of American national space and its link to concepts of national identity and character.

The Cold War’s East-West bi-polarity recapitulated elements of America’s prior investment in the “frontier dialectic,” which saw the American West having a “special relation to American history.”

Turnerian tropes resurface in rhetoric linked to the Cold War’s disputed demilitarized zones, bifurcated nation-states, divided cities, estranged enclaves, restrictive walls and marginal buffer islands.

The problematic denouement of Cold War’s frontier narrative was anticipated by philosopher John Dewey, a critic of Turnerian romanticism, who blamed the nation’s ills on frontier excess.

“Proxy Frontier” examines the mixed legacy of the frontier ethos in Cold War geopolitical space.