The myth of the Frontier and its representations: the United States, From the conquest of the West to the Middle East.

Abstract

For the American imagination, the "Frontier" was an almost mythic space disputed in the West, where Progress was understood as a light that reached the darkness of the wilderness, renewing it in a struggle against the wild and its inhabitants. The hero of the American West was, in different ways, represented as someone who killed indigenous people, symbols and opponents belonging to the wild world, and also the "outlaws" who defied as laws of civilization. Literature between 17th
and 19th centuries often understood violence as a battle between the sacred and the profane, and the occupation of the West, a way of taking the divine word, and regenerating the spiritual and racial purity. Throughout the 20th and 21st century, the Western genre, also in films and in games, continued this process, and addressed the ideological and symbolic role of violence as a regenerative practice of the social order. Different narratives metaphorized the role of the United States in domestic and
global disputes, and have valued the gunfighter as a hero who resolved these conflicts. The developments of the Myth of the Frontier can also be a prism to understand the conflict with the Other in the Middle East, as well as the paradigms of a futuristic utopia.