Confronting the Otherness of Frontier Asia: Changing Perceptions of Wilderness Warfare in US War Narratives

Empires are by their very nature a centrifugal affair; to become imperial is to somehow discredit borders, intuitively move forward, and so extend into a pre-eminence that transcends the here-and-now pragmatics of the nation state. The identities that empires fashion for themselves are not only circumscribed by the often immutable traditions in their centres, but also by the flux of the frontiers upon which their uncertain future is staked. The self-conscious empires of the modern age have always entertained the knowledge that after the rise must come the fall, and this uneasy prescience of inevitability has significantly shaped their cultural responses to perceived transgressions on their imperial frontiers. This article explores the cultural transposition of frontier conflict from the arena of globalised Realpolitik to the aesthetic realm of war narratives in the informal empire of the United States of America both during and after the Vietnam War. The article contends that the characterisation of the frontier in US Vietnam War narratives is heavily dependent upon prevailing attitudes towards perceived degrees of imperial strength or vulnerability that permeate the socio-political domain.status: publishe