Research Project Description

Questions concerning tradition have fundamentally marked the discourses of modernity in twentieth-century Serbia. The processes of constructing national identity and utilising tradition have been defined by complex relations between diverse local traditions and different models of their perception, which were heavily dependent upon distinctive visions of the nation's prospects. A fundamental issue of any comprehensive survey of discourses of modernity and identity in twentieth-century Serbia is to explore the nature of these relations - generally elucidated by François Hartog's concept of Regimes of Historicity. One can assume that the Serbian national community constituted the mechanics and economy of its past from the standpoint of its present and, more particularly, from the vision of the nation's future.

A general tentative assumption of my research proposal reflects the idea that it was exactly the desirable image of the nation's future, which generated the construction and interpretation of Serbia's national history over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. A thorough and systematical exploration of this problem presents the primary objective of my proposed work.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, national history in Serbia was predominantly conceptualised according to some complex perceptions of Byzantine culture and Byzantine heritage - the latter becoming focal to any interpretation of Serbian history, its culture and identity, and permeating the diversity of disciplinary regimes. Multifaceted and changeable historical relations were re-interpreted along stereotypical formulations - the latter meant to confirm an ‘innate' closeness between Serbian and Byzantine culture and thus establish the important and ideologically potent idea of cultural continuity. The nationalisation of history by appropriating Byzantine heritage and constructing the nation's ‘golden age' (a common topoi in the landscape of modern national identities of the Region), based on the implicit formula ‘Glory to come - glory in history', served a number of ideological functions and backed the political interests of the national elite. It was the image of Serbia as an evolutionised Byzantium, that was recognised as capable to sublime and evolve its underlying traditions of the Greek and Roman antiquity and, hence, legitimate itself as civilised and developable.

The core of the proposed research is to explore the discursive mechanisms that generated those complex relations between a perceived and nationalised Byzantine legacy and, on the other hand, examine the imported models of interpretation within the discourse of modernity and identity-building processes, which marked Serbia between c.1900 and the late 1940s. A working hypothesis of my study is to look for the drive for such temporal intervention in at least two ideological functions, namely, to legitimise the expansionist ideologies of the modern Serbian elite, and culturally de-stigmatise modern Serbia as an underdeveloped and uncivilised country. The general research framework will concentrate on the discursive mechanisms of this ‘temporalisation of history' in the academic disciplines - history and architecture, in particular - as they were vital for enforcing the thesis of a so-called Serbo-Byzantine Style based on common, European formulas of progress and evolution of the nation-states.