1st Edition
Chronotopes and Migration Language, Social Imagination, and Behavior
In Chronotopes and Migration: Language, Social Imagination, and Behavior, Farzad Karimzad and Lydia Catedral investigate 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.
1. Language, Migration, and Sociological Imagination
2. Chronotopes as a Theory of Mobility
3. Orientations to the Homeland
4. Orientation to the Host Country
5. Chronotopes, Power and Marginality
6. Transforming and Updating Transnational Imaginaries
7. A Theory that is Life
Biography
Farzad Karimzad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Salisbury University, USA. His research focuses on theorizing context and semiosis in relation to issues of normativity, mobility, and marginality, and the implications of these theories for sociolinguistic and anthropological studies of language and behavior. His work has been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
Lydia Catedral is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong. She is a sociolinguist whose research focuses on the intersections between language, identity, and morality across time and space, and the implications for marginalized groups including transnational migrants and LGBTQ Christians. She has published in Language in Society, Language and Communication, and Discourse and Society.
"This study indicates issues relevant to general social life, especially how rechronotopization can be linked to the discussion of transformation. Chronotopic resolution helps examine issues like human consideration and justice across several scales and cases, which helps us to understand migrants better in several ways."
- Naji Obaid, Language in Society
"This isinnovative and original research on two diasporic communities which [are] relatively underresearched in applied linguistics...I expect it to open new avenues of inquiry on the topic of language, migration and belonging of transnational migrants in today’s world...The book presents a significant intellectual contribution to the field of applied linguistics by focusing on the complexity of locality and synchronicity...This is an outstanding book with great potential to shape disciplinary conversations around language, migration and space."
- AAAL First Book Award Committee
