Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief

The death of Diana Princess of Wales, on 31 August 1997, prompted public demonstrations of grief on an almost unprecedented scale. Global media coverage of the events following Diana's death appeared to create an international 'community of mourning'. However, such scenes of 'mass grief' were shadowed by political resistances and social tensions. The mourning - and not mourning - of Diana seemed to cross and yet reconfirm social divisions, to shift and at the same time redraw political boundaries. Mourning Diana examines the events which followed the death of Diana as a series of cultural and political phenomena, from the immediate aftermath as crowds gathered in public spaces and outside royal palaces, to the state funeral in Westminster Abbey. The book explores the distinctive ways that 'mass mourning' and the spectacle of public grief appeared to bring about dramatic shifts in power relations, political affiliations, and cultural identities. Contributors investigate the complex iconic status of Diana, as a 'spectral' figure able to sustain a host of alternative identifications, from queer to conservative. The book also traces the posthumous, and highly gendered and racialised, romanticization of aspects of her life, such as her 'humanitarianism' and her relationship with Dodi al Fayed. It also examines the centrality of the Diana events in the project of `New Labour' and `New Britain'.