Language, Culture and Society - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2022

In this introduction we discuss the centrality of the management and perception of space-time coordinates during the Covid-19 crisis and highlight some of the main themes that contributors develop in their articles. In particular, we analyze how contributors’ elaborations of the notion of chronotope involve a discussion of fundamental issues such as the conceptualization of context, the relationships of chronotopes with ideologies, the configuration and interpretation of meanings at different levels, and their social circulation.

In the second part of the introduction we discuss in what ways, by taking up a chronotopic lens, the contributors provide new insights into some of the social processes of meaning making and changes in social relations that have been emerging during the pandemic.

Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, was accused of spreading rumors when he sent a WeChat message containing the diagnostic report of a suspicious pneumonia case to a group of friends. When he later died from COVID-19, his Weibo page quickly become known as “China’s Wailing Wall,” where hundreds of thousands of netizen shared replies to his final post in a mega-thread that continues into the present. Drawing upon a selection of posts from an archive of messages posted to Li’s Weibo in the year following his death, this article examines how participants used chronotopes (Bhaktin 1981) to situate Li vis-à-vis various culturally salient “figures of personhood” (Agha 2005; Park 2021), including “moral hero,” “kin figure,” and/or “deity.” Our analysis further suggests how such positioning, as a response to grief and uncertainty, “moved” authors into a position of distance from hegemonic national chronotopes situating people in a symbiotic relationship of mutual care with the Chinese state. Our analysis thus offers insight into the ways in which collective crises have the capacity to (but do not necessarily) motivate a complex discursive and relational process through which interlocutors enact scalar intimacy (Pritzker and Perrino 2020) as they grapple with shifts in their felt experience of nationhood and/or “culture.”

In this article I apply the notions of chronotope and (re)chronotopization to the case of grassroots, migrant domestic worker (MDW) led activism during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. I compare the chronotopes that are produced by the Hong Kong government with those produced by migrant-led organizations to understand how migrants are marginalized and how they resist this marginalization. More specifically, I show how the spatiotemporal configurations of “home,” “days off,” and “the time of COVID-19 in Hong Kong” are rechronotopized – that is, reimagined, remoralized and rematerialized – through the discourses and actions of these grassroots organizations. I use this data and analysis to reflect on how the notion of rechronotopization can account for the social processes involved in activism more broadly; and to draw attention to the dialectic relationship between differently scaled chronotopic materialities and morally loaded chronotopic imaginaries.

Memes have been described as textual forms of “(post)modern folklore” (Shifman, 2014: 5). Photos or short videos, they highlight current cultural phenomena, and they spread exponentially through person-to-person sharing on social media platforms. For this article, I created a corpus of memes that circulated in March 2020, during the first weeks after statewide lockdown orders were issued in the U.S. in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Bakthin’s (1981) concept of the chronotope, I analyze a subset of these memes that specifically addressed the experience of time in confinement, illuminating two interrelated trends: the disruption of temporal order in the present and the projection of chronotopes of hindsight in which this present gets resolved as past. Through detailed textual analysis, I show that the memes reveal both a widespread sense of disorientation and a corollary impulse to mitigate it through the imagination of spatiotemporal realms. I argue that such chronotopic projections can serve as a response to temporary but profound uncertainty, caused in this case by the public health crisis in its initial stages.

In our contribution to this special issue on “Chronotopes & the COVID-19 Pandemic”, we discuss the complexities of human survival and its dependence on collective learning. We argue that collective learning – and thus survival – is a sociolinguistic phenomenon and lay out a fractal system in which the related sociolinguistic processes play out. This system highlights the chronotopic-scalar situatedness of survival and captures the material, textual, and imagined aspects of learning and meaning-making. Drawing on interactions among a small group of Iranian migrants dealing with the effects of COVID-19, we discuss the processes through which participants dynamically construct and update their chronotopic images of their new circumstances, as they interact with material and semiotic data coming from multiple scales/centers. We show how the normative-semiotic indeterminacies caused by COVID-19 are navigated by social actors as they make sense of their spatiotemporal surroundings in pursuit of material and ideological survival.

The focus of this article is the analysis of stance taking vis-à-vis a chronotope born during the Covid-19 pandemic as a window into how people react to global crises and into the kinds of values that get an uptake and become widely shared in periods of unrest. I focus on Twitter users’ reactions in relation to a “chronotope of the balcony performances” that developed in Italy during the national lockdown. I analyze the stances that participants express towards the chronotope itself and a variety of objects related to it, and the semiotic resources that they recruit to do so. I show how a general positive reaction to the chronotope is related to the balcony performances being seen as expressing solidarity. Data for the paper come from 110 top tweets resulting from a search based on the presence of chronotope-related words and 95 tweets responding to one of the original tweets.

During the first months of 2020, our everyday life suddenly changed when the novel Coronavirus started to infect humans at a very fast rate, causing serious respiratory and other diseases, death, and fear of the unknown. Local friends and family members shared traumatic stories, images, and videoclips about death and dread in Northern Italy, where the first confirmed COVID-19 cases were discovered, just two months after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China (Worobey, 2021). Inspired by Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope, by autoethnography and phenomenology, within a linguistic anthropological framework, this article examines how individuals have been embodying COVID-19 related uncertainties and fears in their everyday life. Through the analysis of (auto)ethnographic narratives, recontextualized images and videoclips, including the ones related to the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, I show how regionalized chronotopes of war and more global chronotopes of dread have emerged and solidified across pandemic times.