| Summary/Abstract |
Like all contested concepts, the term ‘Levant’ is unstable. Both its academic and political uses are geographically and historically fairly loose and ill-defined. This geo-historical instability makes room for the multiplicity of chronotopes that the contributors lay out in this special issue. In order to bring these contributions together, we also use the theoretical concept of the chronotope, the way that authors and actors under study bring together time and space in their legitimation of political efforts in the present. The chronotopes treated here have far-reaching implications in our experience and knowledge of the Levant. With Bakhtin’s chronotopic method, we approach the region through its entangled history, taking people’s mobility, their composite identities, and the major transformations in their lives as the central concern for analysis.
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