Među javom i med snom. O balkanizmu i neuspehu konstruktivizma u Srbiji: pogled iz prošlosti
"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream..." or Staying Awake? On Balkanism and the Failure of the Constructivist Standpoint in Serbia: A View from the Past

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the meanings of representations of Serbia, the Balkans and Europe at the time of encounter between Enlightenment and Romanticist traditions. The analysis starts from the assumption that the emergence of negative representations of South Eastern Europe cannot be discussed without placing it within the broader context of 18th and 19th century philosophy and literature and the consequences of new philosophical and literary ideas. Underlying the substantial change of the previously dominant paradigms that is expressed in the symbolic division into 'West' and 'East', there was a factual rather than symbolic division into an industrial and an agricultural Europe, whose boundaries coincided with the reference points of the symbolic distinction. Insisting on the importance of both analytic levels – the 'symbolic' and the 'factual' – the first section of the paper briefly outlines the development of symbolic geography in the context of 'Balkan' studies ('Balkan variations of orientalism' or 'balkanism') in the 1990s, as well as the failure of this genre and the constructivist paradigm in Serbian social theory. The second section is devoted to the discourses of conceptualizing broader communities in symbolic, linguistic, imagological, cultural, political, economic etc. terms, focusing on the beginnings of ideological and linguistic unification of South Slavs and their inclusion into the "enlightened Europe". By analyzing Vuk Stefanović Karadžić's writings, as well as correspondence, articles and commentaries referring to Vuk's work in the first half of the 19th century, the author takes the perspective of the past in order to identify the reasons for the failure of imagological and constructivist approach today.

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