Diva Nation: Female Icons From Japanese Cultural Culture ed. by Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland (review)

There are many ways to define the word "diva" and many local and global examples that illustrate a phenomenon that goes far beyond the original meaning of the word as "opera diva." This collection is an important contribution to a better understanding of the diva in the postfeminist era. The main objective of the book is not to celebrate women or womanhood or to disclose notable women who have nevertheless been overlooked by patriarchal historiography but to build a new interpretive framework. Key in this regard is the following proposal, made by the prefacer of the book, Laura Hein: "Successful divas are debt collectors—their honesty is a claim for reparations, but their demands are rarely met with an equally honest response" (p. xvi). The rich—and brilliantly written—introduction by the two editors further explores this fundamental hypothesis. It underscores the similarities between the extremely variegated case studies one finds in the book, which covers a broad range of periods and cultural spheres, while managing to carefully point out their common features, all of them linked with the often tragic clash between female genius and social structures.

What most interests the various contributors is the permanent tension—social, ideological, political, in short: cultural—of mainstream culture and diva culture. More precisely it is the tension between traditional Japanese ideas and ideals of womanhood and the often crude rejection of these norms centered on notions such as modesty, restraint and unpretentiousness, by all kinds of women—straight, queer, transgender—whose way of life is exuberantly exceptional as well as exceptionally excessive, at least at certain moments of their life. Not all divas remain divas after their public performances; some of them even choose "excessive normalcy" as their way of performing the qualities and audaciousness of diva lives (the key example here is the Olympic skating champion Asada Mao, who powerfully combined girl-next-door aesthetics with unusual personal strength and career planning).

Written by specialists in Japanese culture, Diva Nation offers a good panorama of the historical and contemporary presence and diversity of divas, ranging from mythological figures to present-day performers and pop stars (for non-Japanese audiences, the best-known example is probably Yoko Ono). The strong historical dimension as well as the generic diversity of the book are unquestionably two great advantages. First of all, the diva phenomenon can emerge as a general pattern of Japanese culture and can do away with persistent clichés, at least in Western eyes, mainly of the geisha figure (roughly speaking, the Japanese equivalent of the "mother and whore" female stereotypes in Western traditions). Corollarily, the mix of high cultural and low cultural examples, theater and literature, music and visual arts, folklore and the Internet also helps foreground these larger patterns. In a second step, and most of the contributions do this in an exemplary way, the initially purely Japanese take on the diva is compared to examples and theoretical readings of the diva in other cultures, European as well as American (this may seem a Western bias, but it helps avoid making nonrelevant comparisons). On the one hand, there is a strong input of general theories on celebrity and performance culture and thus a permanent dialogue with authors such as Richard Dyer, Lauren Berlant and Judith Butler. On the other hand, the Japanese examples are also interpreted and nuanced in light of non-Japanese cases of diva culture, such as Josephine Baker or Judy Garland (and the fact that some Japanese divas are actually cross-cultural examples, such as Yoko Ono, makes these kinds of references and comparisons all the more useful and convincing).

At the same time, the transhistorical and cross-cultural perspectives, perfectly valuable in themselves, come also with a price. All more or less general or generalizing approaches remain in need of a noless-necessary historical periodization...