Abstract
As the crowds took to the streets at the end of August 1997 bearing their flowers, as the news of the death of Princess Diana swept around the world, a different vision of the nation was taking shape. People were joined together in their grief and they were ready to recognise and acknowledge whomever wanted to join them. It was not a moment for judgement but of acceptance. People could come together in their pain and confusion. People could share their feelings with people they had never met, because they recognised themselves in each other, in the loss and grief they shared. There was also will and determination as people insisted that they would queue to sign the books of condolence, however long they had to wait.
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Notes
For some helpful reflections upon the nature of multiculturalism within a post-imperial Britain see, for instance, Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000)
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Multicultures or Postcolonial Melancholia (London: Routledge, 2005)
Victor J. Seidler, Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multiculture and Belongings (London: Routledge, 2007).
Nikolas Rose explores these themes within a framework of Foucault’s notion of governmentality in ‘Governing the enterprising self’ in Paul Heelas, ed., The Values of the Enterprise Culture in the Moral Debate (London: Routledge, 1992). He explores similar themes in Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
This is a formulation that Beck draws on in U. Beck and E. Beck, Iindividualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002).
Anthony Elliot develops this theme in Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), p. 119. He notes that pluralism, contingency, ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty were ideas of social life assigned a negative value within modernity that have come to be central features of contemporary life. Selfhood and identity become ‘open-ended’ as ‘the dismantling of the human subject’ takes place and identities are fragmented, dislocated and multiplied. But this is not to be construed as wholly negative and Elliot, in line with poststructuralist thinkers – suggests that the: ‘disintegration of self provides the necessary representational basis for fresh thoughts and feelings’. He argues that there is a dialectical interplay between ‘deintegration and restructuration of subjectivity’. He thinks people increasingly achieve a level of reflexive awareness without the need for certitude and with ‘a remarkable tolerance for ambiguity and confusion’. The terms of Eliot’s somewhat generalised formulation would be enriched if it engaged more directly with issues of gender and the ways people live in relation to others within interconnected lives, histories and cultures.
For a sense of Richard Sennett’s illuminating work on the nature of new capitalism and the ways it impacts and shapes people lives and relationships see, for instance, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) and The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).
For some helpful introductory discussion about postmodern culture and ways it frames questions of identity, see for instance, Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1994) and the changes in his thinking reflected in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) and his more recent Liquid Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)
Albert Melucc, The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
James Thomas in Diana’s Mourning: A People’s History (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002) challenges the media presented images of a British nation united in tearful grief to mourn their ‘People’s Princess’. He provides evidence, drawing on views recorded for the Mass-Observation of Britain project, for ‘the diversity, complexity and ambiguity of popular reactions to Diana’s death, and demonstrates, that, far from being united, the British people were in fact deeply divided in grief in September 1997’. Though he seeks to question the accuracy of media representations of popular opinion and to illustrate the media’s power to influence attitudes and shape the myth of a nation in mourning, I think that he misses the point of what was happening and how people were being influenced. As I argue the media has to change tack as it felt obliged to hand over microphones to the crowd because it could not fit what was happening into its own categories and expectations. Of course, people felt different things and people were divided and felt ambivalent but this is to be expected and in part shows the limits of the methodologies we inherit to illuminate emotional and affective life through interviews and attitude surveys. As we listen to the voices that Thomas shares we recognise diversity but at the same time we have to be careful about notions of a ‘nation united’ in grief. More complex processes are going on and we need to recognise the significance of emotion and cultural memory.
For some interesting discussion of the New Labour project and its attitude towards globalisation and markets, see for instance, David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986)
P. Heelas, S. Lash and P. Morris, eds, Detraditionalisation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualised Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) and Globalisation: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
For discussion around the Parekh report and questions about the revisioning of ‘Britishness’ within a multicultural and multifaith British society see, for instance, Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000)
Paul Gilroy, After Empire (London: Routledge, 2005)
T. Modood and P. Werbner, eds, The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community (London: Zed Press, 1997).
Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society, eds, Digby Anderson and Peter Mullen (London: Social Affairs Unit: April 1998).
The implications of the radical split between reason as an independent faculty and nature that has structured a Kantian rationalist tradition within modernity were initially explored in Victor J. Seidler, Kant, Respect and Injustice: The Limits of Liberal Moral Theory (London:Routledge, 1986).
See also a further exploration of the gendered implications in Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason (London: Methuen, 1984).
For some helpful discussion around the emergence of therapeutic cultures and their strengths and weaknesses see for instance, Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
For discussions around emotional literacy Susie Orbach, Bodies (London: Profile Books 2009).
Some helpful discussions of postmodern conceptions of identity are offered by S. Lash and Friedman, eds, Modernity and Identity (1992)
Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge: 1990)
Linda Nicholson and Steve Seidman, eds, Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
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© 2013 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler
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Seidler, V.J. (2013). Introduction: Postmodern Imaginations and Cultural Memories of Grief. In: Remembering Diana. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371903_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371903_1
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