Race and multimodality: An introduction to the special issue

Abstract

This issue brings together teachers, researchers, performing artists and creative practitioners who discuss, analyze, and reflect on the possibilities offered by examining how multimodality shapes the social and cultural landscape of understanding race and racism. We invite readers to consider: How is race a multimodal construction? How is race, as a social and cultural artifact, constructed and reproduced within the multimodal machinery of modern society? What possibilities does multimodal theorizing offer as a pedagogical approach to advance anti-racism? We argue that multimodality allows for a different conceptualization of race – it is not a text written with the arbitrary and slippery language of race, but an assemblage of multiple modes that constitutes a racial world that is not only “read” but also “lived” and “felt” by those who live in it. The authors in this issue demonstrate how race shows up—or appears—as an assemblage of multiple modes of communication that individuals and groups utilize to make meaning. Through the analyses of multimodal texts such as videos, photos, legal documents, film subtitling, ethnographic observations, interracial dialogue and spoken word performance, they explore the social and cultural construction of race as multimodal process.