Narrating Desire for Place: Chronotopes of Desire for the Portuguese Homeland Before and After “Return”

This chapter examines how Ana, the daughter of Portuguese migrants raised in France, discursively constructs her desire to be in and of Portugal. Specifically, I examine how Ana uses language to display her desire for Portugal and to be Portuguese before and after her move to that country, the realisation of her lifelong dream.

This chapter adopts a Bakhtinian framework to not only examine constructions of place but also desires for place. In particular, with the resurgent use of Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope (1981), scholars have addressed constructions of place as also constructions of time and personhood (Agha 2007). Bakhtin’s notions of voicing and chronotope have provided productive tools for exploring discursive performances of multi-voiced identities, as these emerge across both the current interactional and narrated space-times. However, Bakhtin-inspired scholarship has paid less attention to questions of desire. I discuss the chronotopic interconnections of place and personhood in terms of how one participant narrates her desires for place and place-linked identities, as she signals these across narrating and narrated realms.