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Diasporic Imagination and Chronotopes Cover
By: Gergely Szabó  
Open Access
|Dec 2023

Abstract

The ways diasporic groups emerge and diasporic identities are constructed have recently become important research topics in sociolinguistics. However, these works have not paid sufficient attention to the spatial-temporal configurations of diasporic imaginations. In this article, I intend to shed light on the ways differing diasporic imaginations are inscribed on what kind of language-related diasporic activities are created by the diasporic subjects. To answer this question, I draw on the data of an ethnographically informed critical sociolinguistic study of diasporization among Hungarians in Catalonia that I conducted between 2018 and 2022. In the analysis, I compare the chronotopic figures appearing in the life journey narratives of Hungarians in Catalonia with the ways the ideal diasporic subject was imagined in the activities of two salient diasporic organizations. The article points to the fact that diasporic imaginations do not only contain moral guidelines on how diasporic subjects should behave, but they are also determined by the time and the space diasporic subjects inhabit.

Language: English, German
Page range: 118 - 134
Published on: Dec 10, 2023
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 3 issues per year

© 2023 Gergely Szabó, published by Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.