Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The paper uses American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to identify and deepen a convergence between superficially opposing viewpoints in North American media. Through a series of associational juxtapositions, I discuss how visual media and podcast production open up what are represented as new frontiers in communication. At the same time, I develop a focus on the newer frontiers of political discourse that became apparent with Trump’s “perfect call” to the Ukrainian president, and the subsequent playing out of the congressional impeachment process. I argue that images of the “Frontier” offers the associational engine which permits the thinking together of what appear to be radically different perspectives. The paper argues that the spatial perspectives offered by primitivism and neo-primitivism are the most apposite paradigms through which to see the essential unity of differing political opinion.