Copper face of ancient America: representation of Mesoamerican civilizations in American pulp-magazine Weird tales in the interwar period

Abstract

In the Interwar period different form of Ancient civilization had been one the most frequent theme in American popular culture. Lost Indian civilization wasn’t exception, but this is-sue is still poorly investigate in the popular culture’s field. The article examines, based on John Cavelti's theory of for-mular fiction and John Saler’s “imaginary worlds”, the repre-sentation of pre-Columbian civilizations in one of the most significant American pulp magazines, Weird tales, and the ways in which their heritage is appropriated by American popular culture. We come to conclusion that representation of pre-Colombian indian civilization was within the general nar-rative of the ancient (like Egypt and Babylon), but had differ-ence in tropes. This concerned attention to the phenomenon of sacrifices. Also, the authors were anxious about issues of race, since the racist view of Latin Americans was a constitu-tive stereotype for many Americans. To prevent this problem from interfering with the appropriation of the Indian ancient heritage as uniquely American, the writers excluded the in-termediary in the person of a modern resident of Mexico. Mexico was represented as a poor, unstable country, just an epigone of its magnificent ancestors.

Keywords

• popular culture
• mass literature
• mass culture
• pulp-magazine weird tales
• imagology
• historical imagination
• mexico–united states relations
• historical memory