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Drawing on recent work on the linguistic production of social markedness, this article explores the cross-border usage of what I term the “Dallas” chronotope: a form of poetics that critically frames the political-economic logics that undergird the markedness structure central to the time–space relational construction of migrant illegality. In a community where back-and-forth movements between Mexico and the United States result in varying degrees of Spanish–English bilingualism, the Spanish expression “da' las” (to give ‘em)—short for “dar las nalgas” (to give your buttocks; a reference to getting screwed, comparable to the English colloquial expression “to give it up” in reference to a sexual offering)—is invoked as a phonetic equivalent of “Dallas,” the name of the city in Texas, figuratively equating the social violation of migrants with sexual violation of the body. I extend the analytical frame of markedness through an application of the notion of biopolitics to these instances of linguistically mediated spatiotemporality within a U.S.–Mexico transnational context in order to describe how embodied poetics figuratively construct a resilient sense of migrant personhood that undermines its marked status and literally performs resiliency into being.

In this article I examine ethnographic data collected during the rehearsals and performance of a play created by a group of Spanish seniors at a social center near Paris. The play recounts a Spanish immigrant's return to her pueblo from France after years of living abroad. Drawing on Bauman's (1992, 2011) notion of “cultural performance,” I approach the play as a reflexive event that stages the most significant meanings of the community by and for whom it is created—meanings that include the modernist chronotope that dominates it. This particular chronotope—in which France is associated with progress and sophistication, and Spain is associated with backwardness and provincialism—serves as an organizing framework for the community as they represent and make sense of their experience of migration. On an individual level, however, the narrative of return does not necessarily manifest this particular chronotopic structure. To illustrate this divergence, I present Fina, an actor in the play and the author of an autobiographical monologue included therein. By juxtaposing these distinct articulations of the same narrative—one communal, one individual—I show how processes of identification may be linked to chronotopic variation depending on the scale at which they occur.

The performance of Kriolu rap in Lisbon, Portugal has emerged at a time when Western European countries are reassessing the relationship between national territory and identity. Attractive to some and disturbing to others are the attitude and flair of Kriolu rappers. A group of mostly young men of Cape Verdean descent, these rappers insist on speaking and singing in Kriolu, a creole language that lacks official-language status in both Portugal and Cape Verde. In this article, based on analyses of rap lyrics, excerpts from my fieldwork conversations with rappers, and structural features of the Kriolu language itself, I propose that Kriolu rap is a renewed interrogation of diaspora and of place-based identity. More generally, I propose that, when contextualized in terms of cultural history and (post)colonial politics, Kriolu rap offers insight into the relationship between words and music as part of a process of combining aesthetics with social claims. [creole, rap, diaspora, chronotope, Cape Verde, Portugal]

This article examines the ways in which members of a black community in Oklahoma, United States, solicit local government support for their efforts to access environmental justice resources. An important way in which they do so is by formulating chronotopic discourses that contextualize their community's current environmental problems within local historical understandings of racialized space. Their claims that racist municipal practices, both historical and contemporary, have caused the pollution and deterioration of the areas in which they reside, thereby marking those spaces as “black,” are countered by city officials' and environmental agencies' use of atemporal “color-blind” discourses. These discourses both dehistoricize and deracialize the community, and even make it possible for the residents themselves to be accused of racism. Through the construction and assertion of spatiotemporally neutral chronotopes, such “color-blind” discourses erase both history and race from the landscape while, at the same time, they effectively (re)racialize persons and communities, thus allowing institutional and environmental racism to persist. [chronotope; environmental racism; politics of space; discourse]

“Congo” spirits, “black witches,” African slaves, and maroons are ubiquitous historical figures in religious and folklore performances of eastern Cuba, where they are represented through collocations of Bozal speech register, stereotypical “African” vocal and bodily mannerisms and dance forms, and distinctive uses of deictics that present first-person, historical-present accounts of past events. I trace an interdiscursive web across which these racially marked semiotic forms constitute a Cuban racializing discourse that makes blackness highly salient and highly marked by emphasizing a chronotope of blackness as “a timeless past still among us.” This racial chronotope, re-enacted through different performance genres with diverse purposes, contributes to multiple projects of historical subjectivity. [interdiscursivity, historical subjectivity, racialization, folklore, performance, Cuba]

The Northern English Sheep Counting Score, a stray numeral system, has been vexing folklorists and linguists for over a hundred years. I suggest that the form of the score reflects a process of specialization distinct from the abstract mathematical functions which characterize common numeral systems. This specialization is explored through the use of Bakhtin's concepts of minor and major chronotopes. Chronotopes, understood as the creation of spatiotemporal ground on which indexicality has meaning, are used to describe the ways that contiguity and sequence form dialogically interacting indexical relationships at various levels of analysis, from minimal adjacent pairs and rhythm, to performance, to the large-scale chronotopes organizing scholarly and popular discourses. [Sheep Count, chronotope, indexicality, numeral systems, ethnomathematics]

The figure of the primitive circulates globally as a projected other of self-conceivedly modern people, who through it wrestle with their own historical conditions. But what makes representations of the primitive persuasive? This article examines genre, register, and voice features of a highly repetitive sample of travel narratives about Korowai and Kombai people of New Guinea published in high-circulation magazines and newspapers. I suggest that the genre's effectiveness turns on cultivation of iconicity among three event-worlds: a chronotope of narrated travel, a chronotope of author-reader relations, and a mythic chronotope of the civilized and the primitive. In a “hall of mirrors” effect, dense networks of intratextual iconicity make broad primitivist stereotypy, narrow travel events, and the textual event of travel writing performance support each other's believability, vividness, and claims to attention. [chronotopes, travel writing, iconicity, repetition, temporality, narrative, myth]

Cross-culturally, the types of interactions that anthropologists have studied as “gossip” or “rumor” are opposed to types that constitute more authoritative texts. Instead of using participant structures to define such types of interactions, this opposition is used as a means to consider the evidential function of such descriptors. The discussion considers these issues from the perspective of non-Jewish, Latino labor migrants in Israel, whose usage of chisme (“gossip”) versus rumor (“rumor”) maps to in-group and out-group sources. The paper further considers how such frames were used in a short-lived weekly magazine, centered on the ritual chronotope of La Cancha (the soccer field), and also how a denunciation was quashed by producing an authoritative voice that condemned it as “chisme.” [gossip, evidentiality, authority, publicity, voice]

This article explores the reflexive role the Norwegian musical group, Vommol Spellmanslag, played as a mass-mediated cultural expression of an emergent counterpublic in 1970s Norway. It also examines how “Vommol Valley,” a fictitious community described in Vommol's music, came to constitute a cultural chronotope of dissidence within a context of sociopolitical polarization following Norway's 1972 referendum on membership in the European Economic Community (EEC). In their performance, Vommol deployed contrasting phonolexical registers to animate socially recognizable regional and class subjectivities. This article questions how the replication of regional and class indexical speech in Vommol's verse made available various role alignments to its listening audience. [Norwegian; register; popular music; chronotope; role alignment]

Any discursive event of communication can invoke (index) one or more other events in the nontrivial sense that focal aspects of the ongoing entextualization presuppose that the indexing and indexed lie within some chronotope of "-eval"ness. Varied processes in distinct institutional sites in the macrosociological communicative economy shed light on the contingent varieties of such interdiscursivity. Token-sourced interdiscursivity implies a reconstruction of a specific, historically contingent communicative event as an entextualization/contextualization structure, complete in all its essentials as drawn upon. Type-sourced interdiscursivity implies normativities of form and function, such as rhetorical norms, genres, et cetera. Token-targeted and type-targeted interdiscursivities concern the characteristics of the indexing discursive event(s) as contingent happenings or normativities.