James Clifford draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the "chronotope" (literally "time-space")
Toop's explanation: "The chronotope is a fictional setting where historically specific relations of power become visible and certain stories can 'take place' (the bourgeois salon in nineteenth-century social novels [or] the merchant ship in Conrad's tales of adventure and empire"
Clifford applies this concept to World War II-era New York: a "wonderland of sudden opening to other times and places, of cultural matter out of place"