Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief

by Steinberg; Deborah Lynn

• ISBN13: 9780415193924
• ISBN10: 0415193923
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-10-05
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on September 1 1997, prompted public demonstrations of grief on an almost unprecented global scale. But, while global media coverage of the events following her death appeared to create an international 'community of mourning', popular reacions in fact reflected the complexities of the princess's public image and the tensions surrounding the popular conception of royalty.Mourning Diana examines the events which followed the death of Diana as a series of cultural-political phenomena, from the immediate aftermath as crowds gathered in public spaces and royal palaces, to the state funeral in Westminister Abbey, examining the performance of grief and the involvement of the global media in the creation of narratives and spectacles relating to the commemoration of her life.Contributors investigate the complex iconic status of Diana, as a public figure able to sustain a host of alternative identifications, and trace the posthumous romanticisation of aspects of her life such as her charity activism and her relationship with Dodi al Fayed. The contributors argue that the events following the death of Diana dramatised a complex set of cultural tensions in which the boundaries dividing nationhood and citizenship, charity and activism, private feeling and public politics, were redrawn.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Preface: Mourning Diana and the scholarly ethic	ix
Adrian Kear
Deborah Lynn Steinberg
Ghost writing	1	(14)
Adrian Kear
Deborah Lynn Steinberg
Exemplary differences: mourning (and not mourning) a princess	15	(25)
Richard Johnson
Our lady of flowers: the ambiguous politics of Diana's floral revolution	40	(20)
Susanne Greenhalgh
Be(long)ing: New Labour, New Britain and the `Dianaization' of politics	60	(17)
Valerie Hey
Rhetoric, nation and the people's property	77	(21)
Joe Kelleher
The crowd in the age of Diana: ordinary inventiveness and the popular imagination	98	(10)
Valerie Walkerdine
Diana and race: romance and the reconfiguration of the nation	108	(12)
Mica Nava
Mourning Diana, Asian style	120	(6)
Jatinder Verma
Celebrity and the politics of charity: memories of a missionary departed	126	(16)
Arvind Rajagopal
Mourning at a distance: Australians and the death of a British princess	142	(13)
Jean Duruz
Carol Johnson
I'd rather be the princess than the queen! Mourning Diana as a gay icon	155	(14)
William J. Spurlin
Diana between two deaths: spectral ethics and the time of mourning	169	(18)
Adrian Kear
Downloading grief: minority populations mourn Diana	187	(24)
Diana Taylor
Notes on contributors	211	(3)
Index	214