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

Abstract

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.

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

“…Scholars in various disciplines have taken up the chronotope, proving it to be a useful analytical tool for making sense of all kinds of texts and how they function “as X‐rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring,” as Bakhtin's editor (1981:425–26) writes in a glossary definition of the term. Among sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, the concept has been applied in creative and fruitful ways to the analysis of language use in interaction and the narratives that emerge within it—in particular, in settings of migration and diaspora (Agha ; De Fina and Georgakopoulou ; Dick , ; Divita ; Eisenlohr ; Georgakopoulou ; Koven 2013a, 2013b; Lempert and Perrino ; Perrino , ; Schiffrin ; Wirtz ; Woolard ). A recent strand of thinking has considered how acts of identification—whether personal, political, or ethnolinguistic—are “chronotopically grounded” (Blommaert :97), enabled by the strategic invocation of spatiotemporal frameworks that are intelligible within certain cultural and historical settings (Blommaert and De Fina ; Karimzad ; Karimzad and Catedral ; Woolard ).…”

“…Oftentimes during fieldwork my informants distinguished different kinds of Spaniards, as Amalia and Marisol do above, to establish a social order by which they could make sense of their experience of migration (see Divita ). A few turns after the above extract, for example, Amalia stated explicitly: “ me gustan más los españoles que están en Francia que los españoles españoles ” [I like Spaniards in France better than I like Spanish Spaniards].…”

“We suffered in our bones just like them”: Comparing Migrations at the Margins of Europe

“…Memories of emigration are central to peoples’ ideas about what it means to be Andalusian; by extension, they have become a critical means of grappling with new migration in the region. This is hardly surprising; the experiences of return migrants often become primary sites for the articulation of personal and communal morality and political worthiness (Divita 2014; Koven 2013; Olwig 2012). However, my interlocutors’ historical memories are unique in their comparative focus on the relationships between emigrantes and inmigrantes as a formative aspect of the vexed relationship between emigrantes, Spain, and Europe.…”

“…An elderly interviewee told me that during the Spanish Civil War and postwar he was stationed with the military in Irun, at Spain's border with France, where he could look across the border and “see Europe.” When I asked why he considered Spain external to Europe, he said he could always tell by looking at the contents of the cargo train cars that moved back and forth across the tracks spanning the border. “All the machines, all the technology” were on the trains coming southbound through Irun, while, in his recollection, the only things Spain was exporting “into Europe” were “crops and some horses; that's all we had.” David Divita calls this tendency to associate Spain with “backwardness and provincialism” and northern Europe with “progress and sophistication” the “modernist chronotope” of European migration discourse (2014: 2).…”

On the Disassembly Line: Linguistic Anthropology in 2014

“…In another study of reflexive performance, Elizabeth Falconi () found that some members of transborder Zapotec‐Spanish‐speaking communities in Oaxaca and the United States maintained a strong generic requirement to tell traditional tales in Zapotec, even while those tales were actually framed or fully told in Spanish. David Divita () explored how a group of Spanish seniors in Paris represented and processed their experiences of migration through rehearsing and performing a play, “ ¿Volver a España? ” [To Return to Spain?].…”