REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN TRAUMATIC HISTORIC EVENTS IN THE USA CULTURE TEXTS SPACE

Abstract

Philologists and historians argue that it is typical of the modern society to change attitude to the past, which is manifested in criticism of the official versions of the history, restoration of the traces of the annihilated past, development of memorial events, opening access to archives and juridical settling scores with the past. The urgency of this phenomenon is attributed by the authors of the article, first of all, to the disappearance of living memory of the generations of witnesses of the most terrible crimes in the history of mankind, and to the processes of mediatization of memory and development of information technologies. The article deals with the methods of modeling of traumatic events related to Afro-American slavery and racial terror, in the US culture. The authors analyze examples of metonymic reconstruction and metaphorical coding of the past, symbolic imagery forms of translating memory to other generations, aimed at collective empathy and recognition of extreme violence. The study uses archival materials - photographs and postcards (Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America) with focus on content, syntagmatic and pragmatic characteristics of these pieces of evidence of mass terror. Special attention is given to the transformations of these images by artistic practices in modern visual art, as well as intermedia references to them in political media discourse, fiction, cinema, memorial places and urban space.