(Ré-)incarner la souffrance de l’autre : la circulation intermédiale de l’image-choc The Scourged Back , de la photographie au podcast S-Town

Abstract

Since its publication in 1863, the photograph of a former slave and his “Scourged Back” has kept haunting the American psyche. In 2017, it resurfaced in the podcast S-Town, where the protagonist, a white inhabitant of a rural Alabaman small town, sports a tattoo of scars left by whip marks on his entire back. The unexpected return of this image in the podcast sheds light on the ambivalence of America’s relationship to its slaveholding past and to the question of race relations up to this day.