Chronotopes and Migration: Language, Social Imagination and Behaviour

Farzad Karimzad, Dept of English at Salisbury University (USA)

Lydia Catedral, Linguistics and Translation Dept, City University of Hong Kong (China)

In this seminar, Farzad Karimzad and Lydia Catedral will discuss their recent publication which investigates migrants’ polycentric identities, imaginations, ideologies, and orientations to home and host countries through the notion of chronotope. The book focuses on the authors’ ethnographically situated research with two migrant populations – Iranians and Uzbeks in the United States – to highlight the institutional constraints and individual subjectivities involved in transnational mobility. The authors provide a model for how the notion of cultural chronotope can be applied to the study of language and migration at multiple scale levels, and they showcase a coherent picture of the ways in which chronotopes organize various aspects of migrant life.

This book is a critical contribution to the conversation surrounding the sociocultural-linguistic uses of the chronotope, demonstrating its applicability not only to theorizing migration but also to theorizing language and social life more broadly.