TY - JOUR
AU - Martínez-Guillem,, Susana
AB - How is it that Princess Diana, whose social condition and experiences would appear so distant from those of an ordinary person, could become “the people's princess,” someone whose life and death many continue to celebrate and mourn even today? How did particular media(ted) representations contribute to making Diana a global icon of all things modern, while at the same time turning her into a site through which contemporary anxieties about the nation, and specifically the Western nation, could be managed? These are some of the questions Raka Shome sets out to address in her book, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture. As suggested by its title, Diana and Beyond centers on the figure of princess Diana—or rather, on the Diana (media) phenomenon—but its many intertwined arguments do not stop there. The book is also 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. It is, as Shome puts it, “an investigation, through the Diana phenomenon and beyond, of some of the specific articulations through which the script of White femininity remains linked to the production of a national modern” (p. 40). Throughout its different but highly interrelated chapters, Shome focuses on how several aspects of these specific articulations—Diana's mothering style, her fashion preferences, her romantic relationships, and her healing practices—were publicly framed and interpreted, demonstrating how, in all of these instances, different popular media drew upon and (re)told a particular national as well as global narrative, thus producing a postcolonial neoliberal British identity at the end of the 20th century. In examining these public discourses about Diana, as well as the narratives, myths, and symbols that they relied on and reinforced, Shome draws on an impressive array of “popular” and “everyday” materials, including newspapers, television clips, magazines, movies, and biographies. At the same time, she carefully discusses relevant institutional (con)texts, showing the inevitable connection between the “cultural” and other societal spheres. Shome's attention to the multimodality of the texts she analyzes allows her to look holistically at how linguistic aspects—such as headlines in newspapers and magazines—but also visual elements such as “techniques of lighting” in different iconic images representing Diana often worked together to provide particular understandings of what it meant to be ‘modern’ in this historical conjuncture. Ultimately, such understandings aligned with the “neoliberal revolution,” as Stuart Hall would put it, nowadays consolidated in the United Kingdom and beyond. Chapter 2, “Racialized Maternalisms,” discusses the ways in which representations of Diana functioned to stabilize the myth of perfect motherhood through tropes such as the active, the intensive, or the can-do mother. Importantly, this mothering style capitalized on and reproduced a considerable amount of social, economic, and cultural resources that, however, were erased from these narratives, thus implicitly (re)presenting Diana's (White, upper-middle-class, heterosexual) experiences as universal, desirable, and even required. Through insightful contrasts with non-White mothers and the racializing discourses around them, regardless of class—the Black “welfare mom,” the Chinese “tiger mom”—Shome shows that “parenting patterns of White motherhood are […] never marked” (p. 70), as well as how such naturalizing moves serve to justify social inequalities. The predominant national locus of chapter 2 is expanded in chapter 4, “Global Motherhood,” which shows how similar logics enabled Diana and other White celebrities to be easily positioned as global mothers. The result, in Shome's terms, is an “infantilized cosmopolitanism” that erases and at the same time reproduces broader sociopolitical and economic dynamics. Deep down, and beneath its superficial postimperial aspects, global motherhood is nothing but a “refashioned imperialism.” Chapter 3, “Fashioning the Nation,” also goes beyond the British national context to explore “fashion, and the (White) fashionable female body, as being another site through which the nation manages its ‘newness’ and expresses new logics of national belonging” (p. 76). Throughout this chapter, Shome illuminates how the narrative of changes in Diana's fashion style—from country to urban, from provincial to cosmopolitan—worked hand in hand with a narrative of (good) changes in Britain that allegedly opened it to the world. Once again, Shome exposes the unmarked cultural capital of Whiteness as it intersects with social class, showing how, in this case, the “natural” association of Diana with glamour and style allowed her to unproblematically appropriate Indian-inspired clothing as a way to perform “global multiculturalism.” Her body thus served as a mediating site connecting (new) Britishness to other parts of the (third) world in a depolitized and ahistorical terrain, thus erasing different and important “geopolitical, economic, or cultural gaps” (p. 96) between (White, wealthy) Britain and the (poor, non-White) Global South. Chapter 6, “Cosmopolitan Healing,” further develops this theme of Diana's (and other celebrities) embracement of non-Western cultural practices—in this case health and wellness practices—and the dominant logics of a multicultural, postracist society that these representations draw on and help to sustain. The turn to spirituality that, in the last decades, has progressively individualized agency through affect at the (Western) state level is, in Shome's view, yet another structural component of our neoliberal times that is enabled by the mediating role of White, upper-middle-class women. Through the location and critique of what she terms a “discourse of spiritual capital” (p. 187) that facilitates a unidirectional crossover from the West to the rest, Shome argues that “multicultural, non-Western intimacies and domesticities are absorbed into White western nationalism under the disguise of multiculturalism” (p. 190). Chapter 5, “White Femininity and Transnational Masculinities,” focuses mostly on representation of Diana's relationship with Dodi Fayed. This chapter is perhaps the most novel of the book, as it illuminates an intrinsic relationship between (White) femininity and (non-White) masculinity through which “Muslim masculinity is often evaluated and represented through the lens of White femininity in globally dominant fields of representations” (p. 150). Through the different materials framing Diana and Dodi's interracial romantic relationship, and highlighting the reductive moves in discourses about the Fayeds in newpapers, magazines, or biographies, Shome exposes commonsensical, dominant ideologies about Muslim men that revive old orientalist scripts and consistently position the Fayeds as uncivilized or overtly sexual through tropes such as the “playboy sheikh.” Importantly, as with previous chapters, Shome insists on the ideological force of White femininity as the invisible norm against which the meanings of non-White masculinity implicitly or explicitly take shape. Although at times sacrificing depth of textual analysis for breadth of examples, Diana and Beyond remains a powerful exercise of cultural critique that offers several wide-ranging lessons. First, it highlights that White femininity as a “dependent formation” (p. 205), a relational construct that, as any other hegemonic construct, is constantly negotiated and reworked. In this sense, the contradictions within Whiteness that some the public discourses analyzed reveal—such as the contrast between Diana's mothering style and the Queen's, or between her fashion style and Sarah Ferguson's—stand out as important reminders of the need to “continually look at how White femininity is recrafted to fit contemporary national needs and desires (including liberal multicultural desires)” (p. 75). Second, the different analyses are consistently situated as part of a broader discussion of the social conditions of which the meanings of Diana are a product, and which they help to sustain. Thus, it is important to keep in mind, as Shome does, that economics, policies, and surrounding dominant ideologies related to the rebranding of a British nationalist identity all made it possible for Diana's image to function in particular ways at particular times. Lastly, and in line with some of her previous work, Shome reminds us of the importance of going beyond the imagined community of the nation to embrace broader geopolitical dynamics. At the same time, her study warns us about the dangers of “internationalizing” or “multiculturalist” moves that hide and even help foster global inequalities that may have more to do with (lack of) access to resources than with location. As she puts it: “today, as privileged spaces and groups in the world remain linked by global capital, the Whiteness of privileged White femininity is simultaneously serviced and enabled by the privileged spaces in the so-called non-West as well” (p. 111). Overall, Diana and Beyond is a relational project, and that is perhaps its main strength. As such, it will be of interest to those whose work crosses boundaries among cultural, discourse, celebrity, fashion, feminist, critical race, and/or Whiteness studies. © 2016 International Communication Association
TI - Book Reviews
JF - Journal of Communication
DO - 10.1111/jcom.12239
DA - 2016-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/book-reviews-YAOjG8jeP2
SP - E4
VL - 66
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -