The Language of Asian Gestures: Embodied Words Through the Lens of Film

The Language of Asian Gestures explores Asian gestures as a non-verbal language within the context of films and dramas.

This book provides a cross-cultural Asian perspective on a range of important common gestures and their meanings, covering a range of Asian regions including Korea, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. While most studies focus on text-based communication, gestures find themselves overshadowed by text and speech. Asian gestures, too, often reside in the shadow of Eurocentric viewpoints. This book will shift this dynamic and amplify the voices that have typically been marginalised within 20th-century Eurocentric discussions.

The book will be informative for students and researchers interested in Asian languages, cultures, film studies, and pragmatics. It bridges the gap between words and gestures, unveiling a world of concealed meanings and enriching our understanding of diverse forms of expression.

Jieun Kiaer holds the YBMK KF Professorship in Korean Linguistics at the University of Oxford. As a linguist, pragmatist, and specialist in Asian studies, she has published extensively in the fields of theoretical and applied linguistics as well as translation studies. Her research goes beyond the traditionally Western and text-focused approaches to language, embracing non-European and multi-modal perspectives to offer a more nuanced understanding of human communication.

Loli Kim is a postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhulme project "Sea, Song and Survival: The Language and Folklore of the Haenyeo Women" at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. As a multimodalist, semiotician, and specialist in Asian studies, semantics, and film, she publishes across fields of multimodality, semiotics, translation, semantics, pragmatics, and film and media studies―all drawn together by cross-cultural perspectives that seek to contextualise Asian discourses in their own cultures and to develop the methodological tools needed for doing so.