Science Fiction Series <i>Star Trek</i> and <i>Babylon 5</i> as Forms of Political and Memorial Cultures Construction

Abstract

The author analyzes Star Trek and Babylon 5 series as segments of American political culture and collective memory. The purpose of the article is to analyze how American popular culture, represented by the TV series, actualizes and visualizes the problems of the admissibility / inadmissibility of external influence / non-influence of more developed societies on less developed ones and demonstrates the features of collective memory developments. The author studies the assimilation of the political in the visual discourses of mass culture. Methodologically, the article is based on the principles proposed in the memorial turn and the analysis of the politics of memory within the paradigm of intellectual history. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of common and unique features and directions of assimilation of the political, reduced to the problems of interference / nonintervention, in modern mass culture and historical memory. The article considers 1) the modes of actualization of political and social differences between societies in Star Trek and Babylon 5 TV series; 2) the political and ideological dimensions of intervention through the prism of mass culture and aspects of the functioning of various memorial cultures; 3) the problems of memory as the trauma received during the forced interaction of imagined societies with different identities in the contexts of the development of collective memories and the uncomfortable past revision through the formation of a compromise memorial canon. The article shows the contribution of the series as elements of mass cultural discourse to the development of Western political culture and of Selfness and Otherness concepts, and indicates their role in the revision of the past in popular culture. The results of the study suggest that the assimilation of the political in mass cultural discourse became both an incentive for ideological modifications and transformations of modern society, and a form of promoting the principles of political correctness and tolerance as its systemic characteristics. Moreover, it can be viewed as an attempt to revise the memorial canon and to enhance it by alternative visions of history, based on the revitalization of marginalized collective memories.