Farzad Karimzad & Lydia Catedral, using case studies of migrants from Iran and Uzbekistan in the United States, researched the imaginations, orientations, ideologies, and polycentric identities of these migrants to their home countries through the notion of chronotopes. Both authors highlight similar processes at work in the discursive acts of identification and imagination within the Azerbaijani and Uzbek communities.
Karimzad gives a detailed explanation of chronotopes as a time and space envelope associated with people, behaviors, and moralities. Chronotopes provides us with a way to theorize a more structured understanding of migrants. For instance, in the case of the Azerbaijani and Uzbek migrants in the US, chronotopes help identify how their multilingual and multiethnic nature influences their identity and ideology.
The Azerbaijani have an ideology to preserve their original identity and language despite their sociopolitical and historical circumstances. Similarly, Uzbek ethnolinguistic identity also experienced a shift but maintains the ideology to preserve its cultural identity. Karimzad traces chronotopes from Bakhtin’s original formulation to recent refinements within the socially situated study of language; two waves of the chronotopic are identified in the study within anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship.
Drawing from recorded conversations, observational information, and regular conversations among both case study communities, through supplementing audio recordings with ethnographic notes, this study examines the chronotopic multiplicity of both case studies. Investigation in this study indicates that participants’ language ideologies may overlap but differ within and across participants and participation frameworks. For instance, Karimzad interviewed mainly Azerbaijani educational migrants and green card lottery winners, whose views on visits to friends, home gatherings, and social outings varied. Still, they had overlapping ideologies on their language in most of their conversations.
Being an Iranian Azerbaijani educational migrant, Karimzad made predictions as he collected data from Azerbaijani migrants. Catedral collected data from Uzbeks living in the US. Data from diasporic gatherings reflect how migrants discursively invoke different personal and historical chronotopic understandings of their homeland and how these chronotopes affect their ethnolinguistic identity and interaction in the diaspora. For example, many of the Uzbeks that Catedral interviewed demonstrated their cultural universality and uniqueness by showing her their table spread with their ethnic foods, artistry, and music.
The notion of chronotopization and rechronotopization has dynamics of chronotopic images in the way they are updated, transformed, and updated. The authors use these notions to analyze how migrants and non-migrants imagine each other's lives in two geographical distant time spaces and how migrants sometimes seek rechronotopization. For instance, some Uzbek and Azerbaijani migrants in the US try to transform the images of them or of the community they are part of.
Chronotopes have helped to understand migrants’ lives, subjectivities, and how the theory of rechronotopization and chronotopic resolution goes beyond the case studies in this research. 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.
