Serbian Orient
The first issue of the journal Serbian Orient, with which Matica Srpska initiates the occasional publication of volumes under this title, contains contributions from the scientific conference “Serbian Orient,” held on October 15, 2019, in Novi Sad.
In addition to the primary aim of this kind of transdisciplinary collaboration — the objective and comprehensive factual study, analytical interpretation, comparative insight, theoretical reflection, and presentation of the Oriental dimension of Serbian culture (a subject that has thus far received only sporadic and uncoordinated attention) — the Serbian Orient project also aspires toward a broader, currently highly relevant, fundamental goal.
This goal could be described as an ideological motivation: it is grounded in the effort to overcome the value-laden and ideological burden that has historically and contemporarily hindered Serbian thought in its self-understanding, especially in facing the undeniable fact that Western and Eastern influences — or, more precisely in civilizational terms, the Occident and the Orient — are organically interwoven in our cultural being and identity. It also strives to rationally balance this condition.
This burden is common to all non-Muslim Balkan peoples who spent centuries within the “civilizational circle of the Ottoman Empire.” However, for various reasons, it is particularly pronounced among the Serbs — especially within their intelligentsia — as an accompanying phenomenon in the processes of modernization and “Europeanization.”
In more recent times, the (geo)politically influenced trend of slowing Serbia’s and the Serbian national corpus’s integration into the community of European states — currently institutionalized through the European Union — has reactively contributed to a dynamic opposite to that seen in other Balkan nations. Among them, the internal identity tensions between “Western” and “Oriental” cultural elements have tended to ease and become marginalized, while among the Serbs, these tensions are not decreasing but are, in fact, intensifying.
With the publication of the first volume of the Serbian Orient journal, an open invitation is extended to all those who believe that the mission of expanding, deepening, and objectifying our knowledge about the Oriental component of Serbian culture — and of modern national and civilizational identity — is a worthy and necessary subject of scholarly and research attention.
Editorial Board:
Academician Darko Tanasković, Editor-in-Chief
Prof. Mirjana Marinković, PhD
Prof. Ema Petrović, PhD
Prof. Ljiljana Čolić, PhD
Expert Associate of the Department of Social Sciences:
Nikola Pavlović, M.A.
Email: npavlovic@maticasrpska.org.rs
