ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a powerful triad of frontier/border crossings: the mobility of imagination, obsessions and behaviours that criss-cross national boundaries, racial divides and notions of 'normality', that mobilize a transgressive and 'secret' self-made all the more potent by words like 'taboo'. The commonsense understanding of frontiers is that of space/ lying 'beyond borders'. There is, persistently, the suggestion of something unknown, something tinctured with trepidation, wonder and desire. Critical to the frontier, in Western thought and action, is its hinged companion – border. James Baldwin, the television series Roots, Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Jimi Hendrix, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird are all in the mix but the chronology requires concerted effort. The dystopia of the modernist metropolis is writ large in Baldwin's New York, a place of alienation and loneliness, especially for African Americans, gays and bohemian whites.
