[ecrea] New book - Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity and Contemporary Media Culture

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/54tky7xw9780252038730.html

Diana and Beyond
White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture
(University of Illinois Press)

By, Raka Shome

Analyzes the global circulation of white femininity through Princess 
Diana and other celebrity figures

The death of Princess Diana unleashed an international outpouring of 
grief, love, and press attention virtually unprecedented in history. Yet 
the exhaustive effort to link an upper-class white British woman with 
"the people" raises questions. What 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? Why would a similar 
idealization not have appeared around a non-white, non-Western, or 
immigrant woman?

Raka Shome investigates the factors that led to this defining 
cultural/political moment and unravels just what the Diana phenomenon 
represented for comprehending the relation between white femininity and 
the nation in postcolonial Britain and its connection to other white 
female celebrity figures in the millennium. Digging into the media and 
cultural artifacts that circulated in the wake of Diana's death, Shome 
investigates a range of salient theoretical issues surrounding 
motherhood and the production of national masculinities, global 
humanitarianism, transnational masculinities, the intersection of 
fashion and white femininity, and spirituality and national modernity. 
Her analysis explores how images of white femininity in popular culture 
intersect with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and 
transnationality.

Moving from ideas on the positioning of privileged white women in global 
neoliberalism to the emergence of new formations of white femininity in 
the millennium, Diana and Beyond fearlessly explains the late princess's 
never-ending renaissance and ongoing cultural relevance.

ADVANCE PRAISE

"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

Raka Shome is a media, communication, and cultural studies scholar. She 
has held faculty appointments at the London School of Economics, Arizona 
State University, the University of Washington, and served as the 
2011-12 Inaugural Harron Family (Visiting) Endowed Chair of 
Communication at Villanova University.



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