Abstract
Few people will forget the moment at which they heard the terrible news about Diana’s sudden and violent death and the sense of disbelief that went along with it. It becomes an ‘event’ that helps to shape cultural memory in ways that is both personal and shared within the larger community. It becomes one of those moments, like Kennedy’s death for an earlier generation or 9/11, where you can pinpoint where you were when you first heard the news. It is through such vital events that cultural memories are produced and then circulated through the mass media that help to provide a context and larger narrative though which people hope to ‘make sense’ of what you have lived through.
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Notes
For a sense of these larger cultural and political shifts that were to be organised around globalisation and the dominance of neo liberalism see, for instance, Martin Jacques and Stuart Hall, eds, New Times (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987)
Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso: 1988)
Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)
B. Hesse, Un/settled Multiculturalism: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions (London: Zed Press, 2000)
Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
R. Braidotti, Transpositions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)
U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernscheim, Individualization (London: Sage 2001). If an emphasis upon responsibility as a corrective to a focus upon rights that had partly defined Thatcherism had been a feature of Blair’s New Labour, there were other sources also feeding a concern with individual responsibility, to do with ecological campaigns against road building and a developing awareness concerning the impacts of global warming. The part that Diana played in the landmines campaign was also welcomed by many who would not have identified with her.
Discussions about the changing nature of grief and mourning and what this might indicate about changing social and cultural relations are offered in M. Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (London: Routledge, 1997)
K. Berridge, Vigor Mortis: The End of the Death Taboo (London: Profile, 2001)
S. Benton, ‘The Princess, the People and the Paranoia’, in M. Merck, ed., After Diana: Irreverent Elegies (London: Verso, 1998)
Bee Campbell, Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy (London: The Women’s Press, 1998).
The need many people felt to come into the streets and become part of a public mourning is explored in A. Kear and D. Steinberg, eds, Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (London: Routledge, 1999)
T. Walter, ed., The Mourning for Diana (Oxford: Berg, 1999)
Bee Campbell, Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy (London: The Women’s Press, 1998).
For a useful account of the changing attitudes towards death in British culture see, for instance, T. Walter, On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999)
T. Walter, ed., The Mourning for Diana (Oxford: Berg, 1999).
A biography of the Queen that helps place her reign in historical context as well as map changing attitudes towards the monarchy is provided by Ben Pimlott, The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth 11 (London: Harper Collins 1997/2002).
A thoughtful discussion of the Hillsborough tragedy when so many people were killed in a football pitch is provided by T. Walter, ‘The Mourning After Hillsborough’, Sociological Review, 1991, 39 (3) pp. 599–625.
Peter Ghosh points out the conventions of mourning had been clearly established through a series of different tragedies when he says: ‘The mourning seems almost overdetermined: it would have been extraordinary if it has not happened…anyone who watched the coverage of the death of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, or the Liverpool toddler James Bulger, or of the Scottish children massacred in Dunblane, knew exactly what the conventions were regarding cellophane and messages’, p. 43 in ‘Mediate and Immediate Mourning’, in M. Merck, ed., After Diana: Irreverent Elegies (London: Verso 1998, pp. 41–7). But the fact that certain conventions might be in place neither helps us understand what they might indicate nor the different scale that showed itself at Diana’s death. There is a tendency within sociological accounts to relate some event to what has gone before, as if this is an adequate mode of explanation.
Tina Brown has shared her experience with Diana and interviewed people who knew her during her life in The Diana Chronicles (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
For an illuminating discussion on different notions of citizenship and belonging see Simone Weil’s, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge, 1952)
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books 1983)
Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991)
Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (London: Routledge, 1997)
C. T. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’, in Feminist Review, no. 30, Autumn: 61–88; Avtah Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 1996)
Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anital Hill (New York: Pantheon 1992)
Elizabeth Spellman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988)
Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
A. Nayak, Race, Place and Globalisation: Youth Cultures in a Changing World (Oxford: Berg: 2003).
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© 2013 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler
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Seidler, V.J. (2013). Grief, Public Space and ‘People’s Power’. In: Remembering Diana. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371903_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371903_6
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