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.

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.