The Frontier Experience in Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, and Suad Amiry’s Nothing to Lose but Your Life

Abstract

Settler colonialism is a highly relevant topic whether in the context of the New World as represented by the two Americas and Australia or in the Old World represented here by South Africa and Palestine. The Frontier experience was always related to expansion, empire formation, settler colonialism, and to frontier societies. The present study will examine the significance of frontier experience in three works of literature, The Oregon Trail (1849) by the American novelist Francis Parkman, Dusklands (1974) by the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, and Nothing to Lose but Your Life (2010) by the Palestinian writer Suad Amiry. The present study uses the frontier thesis of the American historian and intellectual Frederick Jackson Turner and applies it to the reading of the three different novels. The emergence of Turner’s theory coincided with his attempt to explain the economic crisis of the United States in 1893 and was later taken by the same author to explain the depression of 1930. The present study is informed by Turner’s thesis as one of the most influential critical theses in the context of American literary and historical discourse. The study traces the various developments of Turner’s theory foregrounding the work of Howard Lamar in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (1981). Whereas Lamar and his colleagues valorize Turner’s hypothesis as exerting “an extraordinarily profound influence” on both American character and American institutions, they find issue with what they consider Turner’s ethnocentrism. It tries to discuss the various definitions of the frontier whether in the American context or in other areas of the world. The thesis will attempt to discuss the links between Turner’s frontier thesis and the Post-Colonial critical theory as represented by Lorenzo Veracini’s work on settler colonialism. From the perspective of the present study, the frontier experience can be analyzed according to Lamar’s tripartite frame: territory, the qualities of the indigenous and the intrusive peoples, and the process of interaction between these two peoples. Finally, the study investigates to what extent each of the three novels under study supports the idea of coexistence and multiplicity within a frontier zone, and to what extent it rejects such pluralistic attitudes, espousing instead racist, separatist, or apartheid attitudes."