“Like the stick pulled through sand to create a line, the frontier marks the point at which the soaring ideals of modernity touch ground.”
“In this morphology of contact, the frontier concerns how the “outside” is produced, exploited, and policed.”
“1. A Line in the Sand: The Frontier as a Ground of Reinscription”
“The hand that marks a line in the sand separating “yours” from “mine” is a hand that inscribes its name into territory. It is a hand that vests authority in the signature, and that upholds contractual relations in the written form.”
“2. The Property of Clothes and the Clothing of Property”
“The frontier, at its base, checks dis/possession and the moral economy of propriety against the “proper” relations of gender and sexuality vis-à-vis the Racial and Colonial Other. This appears to be figured into the Forsters’s account in its focus on the property of clothes as part of a vast and gendered socio-cosmology that adjudicates and disciplines touch, intimacy, dwelling, and inheritance.”
“3. The Frontier Is Territory Turned Away From Itself”
“The maritime era saw the frontier expand with a twofold movement. While the forces of industrializing modernity were propelled toward the recognizable resource value of new territories, the colonial disposition was, by and large, turned against the eco-social worlds that encompassed them. As such, the settler society of the frontier is marked by a fortressed and defensive architecture.”
“4. The Frontier Anticipates an Axiomatic Order”
“Once the proprietorial line in the sand is enclosed in a circle, the imperative is to expand. The modus for doing so is the axiomatic, a reproduction of the same.”
“5. The Imperial and the Global Frontier, and the “New” Arts of Possession”
“The frontier advanced across the flattened Earth of the Mercator projection as a line that marked knowing as possessing. It was only a few years before the Forsters’s diary, in 1770, that Captain Cook had laid claim to the east coast of Australia and the islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand from the northern point of Possession Island, a small landmass in the Torres Strait north of Queensland and south of Papua New Guinea.”