The Backborder: Un/Belonging and the Making of American Identity in the Early Frontier

This paper re-conceptualizes the American backcountry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a Backborder-a formative zone of un/belonging that served both as the geographical periphery of British colonial power and as the ideological threshold through which US Americanness began to take shape. As a borderland space, the Backborder operated as a dynamic site of encounter, where European notions of civility clashed with the unfamiliar realities of the American interior. It was here that a distinctly American identity-improvised, racialized, masculinized-was negotiated through contrast with and suppression of the marginalized: Indigenous peoples resisting dispossession, enslaved Africans whose labor underwrote frontier expansion, and poor white settlers who unsettled elite visions of order. In dialogue with borderland theory (Anzaldúa), settler colonial studies (Wolfe), geocriticism (Westphal), and drawing on the influential insights of Mary Louise Pratt’s work on transculturation and colonial contact zones, this paper offers a new reading of the inland movement across the Alleghenies through firsthand settler narratives by Charles Woodmason, Gilbert Imlay, and Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. These texts reveal the Backborder as an unstable zone of cultural hybridity and contested belonging-a site where the disintegration of European-imposed order gave rise to an “American-bred” civilizational ethos rooted in exclusion and reinvention. By analysing these early texts through a critical interdisciplinary framework, this paper interrogates how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were constructed at the nation’s formative margins-and how these historical processes continue to resonate today. In an era marked by contested definitions of US Americanness and growing exclusionary politics, understanding the cultural and ideological work of the Backborder provides vital insight into contemporary struggles over identity, belonging, and political legitimacy. This study contributes to ongoing conversations about how shifting frontiers-geopolitical, cultural, and symbolic-mediate who is allowed to belong in the American nation and who remains othered or marginalized.