Book review: Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodality and Identity

Abstract

Since the publication of Reading Images (RI) by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen kick-started the study of multimodality in the 1990s, the field has grown and flourished. It is now common to find multimodality addressed in research across discourse studies, and van Leeuwen’s latest book Multimodality and Identity, provides a particularly important and exciting resource for this maturing scholarship. The huge breakthrough and sheer wealth of ideas which RI brought has meant that, for many, the systems and models it developed have remained the go-to model for working with multimodality. Perhaps because of this impact, subsequent work by Kress and Van Leeuwen involving a more social application of multimodality has received less attention. In this book, van Leeuwen brings together the toolkit qualities offered by multimodality and a foregrounding how and why texts they must be understood in their social and political contexts. Multimodality and Identity, provides a model for researchers to be mindful both of the social and systemic parts of multimodality. The book credits two intellectuals in the acknowledgements, M.A.K. Halliday and the semiotician Roland Barthes, who was interested in how power, identities and mythologies are coded into everyday communication, mundane practices and objects. Multimodality and Identity, like van Leeuwen’s earlier work in Critical Discourse Analysis, is indebted to the project of showing how concealed ideology can be revealed. Multimodality can be used to reveal the more buried myths, expectations, power relations and ideologies which shape our lives and societies. There is much that is familiar from Van Leeuwen’s groundbreaking work over the past few decades in the chapters of Multimodality and Identity. There are about colour, textures, typography, shape and movement. But this book is so much more than inventories for documenting the semiotics of these things. This is not a book about the systems themselves, but is rather concerned, in the fashion of Barthes, with how the meanings 1134443 DAS0010.1177/09579265221134443Discourse & SocietyBook reviews book-review2022