Stereotypes and chronotopes: The peasant and the cosmopolitan in narratives about migration*

Abstract

Stereotypes are chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1994) in the sense that they make good use of character types in time and space to utter identifiable speech forms and make evident other semiotic displays. This paper argues for sociolinguistics to expand its interpretation of the chronotope to encompass the relationship between “character” and “author” in identity texts. It suggests that conflating author and character in identity scholarship, as is the case in much sociolinguistic research, risks losing an opportunity to understand how people author characters in their narratives to project sets of values and beliefs. Using linguistic ethnography, we report on two migrant women and their interactions among colleagues to illustrate their authoring of two characters, namely the peasant and the cosmopolitan. We show how these specific women mobilize these characters in narrative production to refute harmful traditions and ethnolinguistic stereotypes in favour of cosmopolitan identities which draw on broader geographical and social scales associated with the city.

Poetic representations of migration narratives: A process of writing nearby

“…The role of the researcher in supplementing the voices of less privileged persons has long been debated, maintaining that entextualization , that is, the making of a new text lifted out of its original interactional setting, and the decontextualization that follows when the text is inserted in new alternative contexts, is an authorial act that has unanticipated political effects (Bauman & Briggs, 1990:73; Bucholtz, 2000; Vigouroux, 2009). There is, for instance, an imminent risk of reproducing inequality by reinforcing stereotypical categories and ideas about people, especially if they are presented as victims of oppression without their own agency (Creese & Blacklegde, 2020; Spivak, 2020). It also has been claimed that such imposed recognition only gives a symbolic voice to people (Fraser & Honneth, 2003) and that everyone has the capacity to express and author their own voice.…”

Chronotopic translanguaging and the mobile languaging subject: insights from an Algerian academic sojourner in the UK

“…Similarly, Blommaert (2019) demonstrates that individuals rely on 'chunks of history' when they perform identity in the interactional present (Blommaert 2015: 12). Creese and Blackledge (2019) analyse time and place in relation to stereotypes about the migrant, separating 'author', 'character' and 'text' to allow for nuanced ways of theorising identity performance. These examples illustrate how the widely adopted interpretation of chronotopes in sociolinguistics is that they can be used to explain the performance of identity and how it continues to emerge and change due to time and place motifs.…”

Discovering and Interpreting Biased Concepts in Online Communities

“…Works discovering biased words overcome some of the limitations of attesting by enumerating all the words that are biased towards others in a word embeddings model [4], [28], [29], [30], [31]. However, the resulting lists of biased words do not explain what these biases mean or to what extent they are important in the context of a community, both of which are needed to properly interpret and study the biases discovered in a community [16], [17], [18]. Our previous work in this direction is presented in [32], in which we define a system to identify a set of words biased towards certain concepts, and organize them in categories in order to compare their biases.…”

“…These limitations make current approaches unsuitable to study biases in the language of online communities. This is because such communities often exhibit biases distinct from those in mainstream culture [15], so anticipating potential biases in advance is difficult; and because understanding the meaning of those biases is needed to properly interpret and study them [16], [17], [18]. Studying the biases of online communities is very important to tackle the social problems they have been associated with, such as radicalization [15] and discrimination against some types of users, particularly those users • Xavier Ferrer, Department of Informatics, King's College London.…”