Entextualization and the ends of temporality

In this article, I aim to shed light on the linguistic and discursive practices entailed in historical meaning‐making—that is, the various ways in which social groups perceive the past and how those perceptions inflect the interactional present. Specifically, I present ethnographic data collected at a day center for Spanish seniors outside of Paris, focusing on interactions among a group of the center's members upon their visit to a museum exhibition documenting the Parisian bidonvilles [shantytowns] in which many of them lived after they migrated from Spain in the 1960s, over 40 years earlier. As they engage with one another and their guide, participants display and enact different modes of knowing the historical content of the exhibition. Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) concept of the chronotope, I show how these modes of knowing the past may be recruited in ideological processes of affiliation and distinction. For the transnational migrants in later life who populate this article, such chronotopic calibration is a vital means of making sense of the past and establishing forms of belonging in the present.*

Section: The Historical Dimension Of Sociolinguistic Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Recalling the bidonvilles of Paris: Historicity and Authority Among Transnational Migrants in Later Life

Divita

2019

“…and the world of the listeners and readers.” He also suggests that while there is always a foundational border between the “represented world” and the worlds of author and reader, this border is permeable: “However immutable the presence of that categorical boundary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up with each other and find themselves in continual mutual interaction” (Bakhtin 1981:254; cf. Lempert and Perrino 2007:208; Agha 2007). Such interaction is my main concern in this article.…”

Section: Chronotopes As Social Worlds Of Desire and Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Textual Iconicity and the Primitivist Cosmos: Chronotopes of Desire in Travel Writing about Korowai of West Papua

Stasch¹

2011

The figure of the primitive circulates globally as a projected other of self‐conceivedly modern people, who through it wrestle with their own historical conditions. But what makes representations of the primitive persuasive? This article examines genre, register, and voice features of a highly repetitive sample of travel narratives about Korowai and Kombai people of New Guinea published in high‐circulation magazines and newspapers. I suggest that the genre's effectiveness turns on cultivation of iconicity among three event‐worlds: a chronotope of narrated travel, a chronotope of author‐reader relations, and a mythic chronotope of the civilized and the primitive. In a “hall of mirrors” effect, dense networks of intratextual iconicity make broad primitivist stereotypy, narrow travel events, and the textual event of travel writing performance support each other's believability, vividness, and claims to attention. [chronotopes, travel writing, iconicity, repetition, temporality, narrative, myth]

“…Linguistic anthropologists who have adapted the concept have drawn attention to the social personae that necessarily inhabit any such time‐space configuration (see, among others, Dick , Eisenlohr , Koven , Silverstein , Stasch ). Lempert and Perrino (:206), for example, argue that the chronotope is closely related to a second Bakhtinian “staple”—that of voice, an image of personhood that inhabits a chronotope and that is indexed by a concomitance of semiotic features. A chronotope, then, configures space, time, and personhood in a meaningful whole; it also functions dialogically through a frame of contrast, without which it represents little more than one possible world among others.…”

Section: Cultural Performance and The Modernist Chronotopementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The time‐space representation within a text is contrasted with the time‐space experience of engagement with that text. Chronotopes thus enable “virtual space‐time ‘movement’ and ‘travel'” (Lempert & Perrino :207) by making available spatiotemporal configurations that would not otherwise be “phenomenologically accessible” (Dick :276). Within the context of theatrical representation, the world created by performers onstage contrasts with the world of actors and audience members offstage.…”

Section: Cultural Performance and The Modernist Chronotopementioning

confidence: 99%

FromParis toPuebloand Back: (Re‐)Emigration and the Modernist Chronotope in Cultural Performance

Divita

2014

In this article I examine ethnographic data collected during the rehearsals and performance of a play created by a group of Spanish seniors at a social center near Paris. The play recounts a Spanish immigrant's return to her pueblo from France after years of living abroad. Drawing on Bauman's (1992, 2011) notion of “cultural performance,” I approach the play as a reflexive event that stages the most significant meanings of the community by and for whom it is created—meanings that include the modernist chronotope that dominates it. This particular chronotope—in which France is associated with progress and sophistication, and Spain is associated with backwardness and provincialism—serves as an organizing framework for the community as they represent and make sense of their experience of migration. On an individual level, however, the narrative of return does not necessarily manifest this particular chronotopic structure. To illustrate this divergence, I present Fina, an actor in the play and the author of an autobiographical monologue included therein. By juxtaposing these distinct articulations of the same narrative—one communal, one individual—I show how processes of identification may be linked to chronotopic variation depending on the scale at which they occur.