ANALYSING MULTIMODAL CULTURAL DISCOURSE: Scope and method

As cultural discourses in the globalising and digitalising world rely increasingly on multimodal resources for making meaning in various communicative contexts, it is important that we give these resources full analytical attention, rather than ignore them or consider them only as a dimension of context. Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses the scope and method of multimodal cultural discourse studies. We argue for the systematic analysis of visual images and introduce a framework for explicit visual analysis. We propose three analytical aspects, namely, (a) comparison of multimodal discourse from different cultures, (b) analysis of multimodal intercultural communication and (c) analysis of transcultural communicative events in particular cultural contexts. We then demonstrate our approach through a case study of a Chinese wanghong (cyber celebrity) woman’s identity construction as transcultural multimodal discourse. We conclude that multimodal analysis can provide new understanding of the complexity and multiplicity of culture in various forms of communication and thus contribute to the objective of cultural discourse studies.