Life here beyond now: Chronotopes of the ideal life among Iranian transnationals

Abstract

I address how U.S.‐based Iranian transnationals’ migration paths affect their (re)‐construction of chronotopes of the ideal life. Adopting an ethnographically grounded, discourse‐analytic approach, I illustrate how participants with student visas and U.S. Green Cards position themselves differently relative to images of success here [in the U.S.] and lack of success there [in Iran]. I argue that the chronotopes of success here and lack of success there (re)‐constructed by non‐resident Iranian students are prompted by a large‐scale cultural chronotope which pertains to their aspiration to stay in the U.S. This chronotope of ‘life beyond’ is less about a ‘remove from homeland’ and more about an ideal future in the host country. Migrants’ desires and anxieties, I argue, can determine what receives topical prominence in migration chronotopes – as in the case of Iranian educational migrants whose future positionings make temporality topically more prominent than spatiality.

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

“…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 ). In their comparative study of conversations among Azerbaijani and Uzbek migrant communities in the United States, for example, Karimzad and Catedral (:90) draw on the notion of “chronotopic identities” (Blommaert and De Fina ) to illustrate the varying power and “ideological force” of space‐time configurations that emerge as their informants negotiate different forms of ethnolinguistic personhood.…”

Chronotopeography

“…Following Bakhtin (1981) and Agha (2007a), scholars of language and society have recently applied the chronotope to other genres of discourse (e.g. Anderson, 2011;Davidson, 2007;Dick, 2010;Harkness, 2013;Karimzad, 2016;Koven, 2013;Rosa, 2016;Wirtz, 2016;Woolard, 2013).…”

“…Drawing on Dick 2010, Karimzad (2016) uses the chronotope to illustrate how the Iranian educational migrants in the U.S. construct spatio-temporal representations of a future ideal life in the host country, when and where they are able to experience the American dream. He argues that such future-oriented discourse in pursuit of a better future is prompted by their less than ideal past and present, given the social, political, and economic issues they have experienced before migration as well as the bureaucratic restrictions around them after migration.…”

Mobile (Dis)connection: New Technology and Rechronotopized Images of the Homeland

“…Agha ). The chronotope has been used to show how migrants and non‐migrants orient to and/or construct images of different centers and sociolinguistic contexts through their discursive practices (e.g., Dick ; Karimzad ; Koven ; Park ; Catedral 2017). For example, Eisenlohr () demonstrates how those in diaspora use narratives to construct a time and place, or an “imagined homeland,” from which they have been removed, and which function to legitimize their belonging in the new nation‐state that they occupy.…”

“…These non‐migrants then evaluate this imaginative sociology through “cultural chronotopes” related to spatiotemporal understandings of modernity and financial success as opposed to morality. Park () and Karimzad (), on the other hand, demonstrate how Korean and Iranian mobile populations use discourses informed by their individual histories to construct chronotopes of an uncertain or ideal future—highlighting the instability of their own subjective positionings within transnationalism. Bolonyai () shows how particular images of the nation‐state populated by certain social types are used to read migrants as “not belonging” through an association of their “foreign accents” with non‐nativeness.…”