Chronotopicity and chronotopic identity in globalization: An ethnographic study of a migrant community

Chronotopicity is a notion introduced to sociolinguistics by scholars such as Asif Agha, Jan Blommaert and Ana De Fina. It was coined by Bakhtin to analyze literary works in the early 20th century and has been increasingly influential beyond literary criticism, in fields such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics and cultural studies since the 1980s. Chronotope depicts the essential “oneness” of time and space, in Bakhtin’s words, the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (1981, p. 84). The present research uses the notion of chronotopicity to analyze and interpret ethnographic data collected from a migrant community in Beijing. The ethnographic fieldwork took about five years; during the fieldwork, we collected photos of linguistic landscaping signs in the community, audio and video recordings of conversations, fieldnotes on details captured by observation and on contextual information of the migrants’ interaction. “Migrants” or “migrant workers” in the present research refer to internal rural migrant workers who relocate to urban centers for labor-intensive jobs; these migrant workers move on a massive scale since the 1980s when China underwent rapid economic changes. Many of them are worn out by work and the demands of daily life, but some have built a community center to record their migrant histories, to voice their concerns as a marginalized social group and to construct their identity as legitimate workers. The community center is a yard rented from an urban village located in the east side of Beijing, with a mini theater and a two-room museum built by active members (also my key informants), including a crosstalk comedian, two musicians, and an educator who runs a migrant school in the community. The research finds that the linguistic landscaping signs of this migrant community center invoke multiple chronotopes and need to be understood in complex timespace frames. The analyses of visual (photos of linguistic landscaping signs) as well as textual (interview recordings and observation fieldnotes) data show that the migrant workers use painting and other creative ways of representation in public space to address their economic position and social identification in a globalizing China.