Description
Book SynopsisWhat narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? This book deals with these questions.
Trade Review"Shome presents critical arguments that challenge the seemingly innocuous tenants of celebrity culture by examining the strategies adopted by privileged upper-class white women to rejuvenate their identities, largely by extracting culture, resources and people from the developing world, and consequently are implicated in the production of neo-colonial conditions."--
Celebrity Studies"The clarity of her writing and her engaging media examples would make this an excellent text for students and seasoned scholars alike. Packaging analytical rigor alongside an exciting array of examples,
Diana and Beyond is as compelling as it is insightful."--
European Journal of Cultural Studies"Raka Shome's
Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture will take the field far in understanding how to cultivate a transnational attentiveness. The dazzling
Diana and Beyond follows Lady Di as she twists and turns, appears stable, transforms, and the moves again across various global and national registers. Shome deftly demonstrates how to study something as seemingly stable as national identity without stabilizing or circumscribing its constituents."--
Quarterly Journal of Speech"A broader exploration of the relationship between White femininity and national ideologies, where particular understandings of the former perform a mediating function between the national and the global. . . . A powerful exercise of cultural critique that offers several wide-ranging lessons."--
Journal of Communication"Sharp analysis of how neoliberal logics have fundamentally changed the politics in the North Atlantic societies in the past decades - as in a shift from 'welfare' to 'wellness'.
Diana and Beyond certainly speaks to many fields of study. In her own elegant way, Shome demonstrates how Princess Diana of Wales has to do with everything else."--
New Formations"An excellent resource for those interested in intersectional studies of nationalism, gender, and popular culture. . . . By identifying points of success and slippage between female iconicity and national identity, Shome’s project successfully traces the shifts in Diana’s Whiteness, as it masks the inequalities of class, religion, and race involving women of color and women of the Global South, to whom her book is dedicated."--
Popular Communication"Brings together one of the most talked about images in recent history, Princess Diana, with one of the least talked about, whiteness. It is a brilliant move, to see, scrutinize and show the elusive, and to many people invisible, structures of white femininity in one of its most visible and vivid manifestations. Combining a painstaking analysis of Diana's immediate historical and cultural context with a wide sense of her connection to other prominent images of white femininity, the book lucidly opens up the gender and ethnic specificities of particular, but also broad and familiar, instances of motherhood, fashion, nation, masculinity, and spirituality. This is a major contribution to cultural history and celebrity studies as well as the fields of gender and whiteness, beautifully written, always enthralling."--Richard Dyer, author of
White: Essays on Race and Culture and
Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society"Well-researched and theoretically sophisticated, this work asks disturbing questions of contemporary neoliberal politics. By focusing on the significance of Princess Diana's whiteness, Shome's work takes us beyond post-imperial, postcolonial analyses of whiteness, by engaging instead with neoliberalism and globalization. Moving between the ethos of New Labour's 'Cool Britannia' and the Coalition government's demands for a skewed and cruel austerity, this work re-inflects race, class and sexuality in contemporary culture in new and significant ways. Without a doubt, one of the most significant books to be written about the intertwining of race, class and gender on the one hand and neoliberalism and multiculturalism on the other."--Radhika Mohanram, co-author of
Imperialism as Diaspora: Race, Sexuality, and History in Anglo-India "
Diana and Beyond generates astute understandings not only of the culture of the contemporary UK but also of transnationalized regimes of gender, privilege, and social class. Raka Shome has produced a genuinely intellectually exciting book that is adept at analyzing important cultural phenomena too often written off as ephemeral, apolitical and 'feminine.'"--Diane Negra, author of
Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom "Shome's book is expertly-written and much-needed, connecting whiteness studies with concerns about neoliberalism and global media cultures."--Catherine R. Squires, author of
The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century
