POST-COLONIAL DISCOURSE AND THE RECEPTION OF ANTIQUITY: THE AFRICAN IDENTITY OF THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD
This paper attempts to demonstrate how the theoretical and methodological complex of post-colonial studies and the intellectual tradition that emerged in African countries in the second half of the 20th century form an entirely new direction in the connotation of the ancient heritage as a post-colonial and de-colonized heritage. Representatives of African culture are turning to the ancient heritage to justify their «black» identity that emerged at the junction of the assimilating colonial and assimilated African cultures and characterizes the hybridization of the cultural tradition of post-colonial African countries. According to this tradition, the ancient heritage is at the center of African critical theories of constructing their own ideas about history, where the African cultural tradition is seen as something that preceded the Greco-Roman one, which is considered to be its direct continuation. The spread of the "black" identity in the countries of Africa, America and Western Europe associated with the slave trade became in the 21st century another version of the interpretation of the ancient heritage as a globalizing and global heritage that not only unites this part of the post-colonial world with a particular type of understanding the heritage, but also contributes to the emergence of new ways for representing post-colonial culture.