The Levant, from utopia to chronotopia: an unsettled word for an unsettled region

Abstract

This essay responds to this special issue’s challenge of thinking the Levant through Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, with a theoretical reflection on the potentials and limitations of chronotopic thought in social and historical scholarship. The essay is structured around two questions. First, given the overwhelmingly literary associations with which we tend to approach Bakhtin’s thought today, is the chronotope a tool for literary analysis only, or is it applicable to other forms of communication, cognition, and action? Second, what implications does chronotopic analysis have for scholarship that seeks methods of analysing and writing about the Levant in a historically and politically responsive way? Should chronotopes always be understood as the a priori horizon of meaningful narration, as frameworks that make certain plots, events, interpretations, and actions possible while precluding others, or are they also an observable and manipulatable aspect of communication, one that can be subject to the quotidian equivalent of authorial intention, creative reception, and political contestation? Placing the chronotope in the context of Bakhtin’s earlier philosophical project, I argue that although the chronotope facilitates the reflexivity and subversiveness which Bakhtin sees as defining and ethically necessary achievements of modern discourse, these characteristics are both self-limiting and morally ambiguous.