Performing the national

Diana and Beyond examines the intersection of cultures of white femininity and discourses of nationhood in late twentieth and early twenty-first century media cultures, with a particular focus on Princess Diana as the cultural standard bearer for the values bound up within it. And the book also incorporates judicious analytical discussion of other high profile figures from millennial popular culture, including Cherie Blair, Angelina Jolie, Madonna and Jemima Khan, as a means of calling attention to the neoliberal formation of citizenship in North Atlantic nations as it is expressed through particular images of ‘privileged white women’ (p3).

Shome contextualises this discursive phenomenon by viewing it through a range of prisms, including motherhood, muslim masculinities, multiculturalism, (post)colonialism, transnationalism, Islamophobia and global cosmopolitanism, as well as fashion, intimacy and spirituality. Each perspective sheds light on the nature of Diana’s iconicity, and the intersection of whiteness and femininity that she embodied, and examines what this means for understandings of Anglophone national modernities; and she also looks at what is at stake for people of colour within these discourses.

Shome begins with an overview of fields and issues pertinent to the discussion, including the gendered cultures of celebrity, white femininities and national identity (with respect both to whiteness and non-white ethnicities); and she contextualises her subject matter both in relation to the ‘New Britain’ heralded by the Labour Party in the Blair era, and the lasting impact and semiotic power of Diana’s mediated image. She examines how the white motherhood of celebrity figures such as Diana operates in negotiating the shifting notions of national modernity and takes Diana as the prime exemplar of the idea that the fashionable (privileged) white woman signifies national modernity in meaningfully politically charged ways. She also interrogates the ways in which the ‘nationalised’ white female body is drawn on to imagine global intimacies: she suggests the term ‘global motherhood’ as a way of explaining the cultural positioning of celebrity white women such as Diana as symbolic mothers to vulnerable, underprivileged children in the Global South, in relation to discourses of global humanitarianism. And she carries over this line of transnational political enquiry to a discussion of the relationship between the ‘nationalised’ white woman and transnational masculinities, especially with regard to Muslim men, subjecting the mediation of Diana’s relationships with Dodi Fayed and Hasnat Khan to particular scrutiny.

In her final chapter Shome explores the role of spirituality in contemporary imaginings of ‘a new kind of gendered white national transcendence’, which she labels the ‘spiritual fix’ of white femininity (p42). The book then brings itself up to date in an afterword that considers performances of the national in the context of contemporary Britain’s culture of austerity, and through new figureheads now embodying white female nationhood, such as Kate Middleton.

Diana and Beyond complements a number of earlier foundational volumes, and Shome is quick to acknowledge that there already exists a substantial amount of published work on the Diana phenomenon.¹ However, she is keen to note that ‘the whiteness of the phenomenon and, specifically, the white femininity angle was hardly being theorised or analysed’, pointing out that there has been very little work to date that has discussed explicitly how ‘this entire national spectacle, which continues to be revisited even today, was enabled by a spectacularisation of white femininity’ (p2). And herein lies a key aspect of the contribution she makes to our understanding of the cultural significance and political stakes of Diana as a mediated spectacle, especially with respect to the production of new national narratives of Britishness in the 1990s.

Shome’s aim is to unpack ‘a constellation of images of privileged white women in order to illustrate a larger formation of white femininity through which many neoliberal logics of national identity and citizenly belonging were being rewritten in the late 20th and early 20th centuries’. And she achieves this aim with a sustained intellectual curiosity for her subject matter, a fierce commitment to making its political stakes clear, and immensely...