Synopses & Reviews
Analysingthe events surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, Vic Seidlerconsiders the public outpourings of grief and displays of emotion whichprompted new kinds of identification and belonging in which communities came together regardless of race, class, gender and sexuality.
Synopsis
Do you remember hearing when Princess Diana died? Memories allow us to recognize how the past echoes in the present, highlighting a tension between the media's attempts to shape cultural memories and produce narratives, and the embodied memories people carry which sense a different reality. As people gathered on the streets, the media discovered the customary discourses of royal funerals did not work and microphones were handed over to the people to voice their own experience. Recognising themselves in the vulnerability Diana had shown, people who were usually excluded took charge of urban spaces and transformed them into spaces of grief. As a new multicultural and intimate citizenship took shape, people felt empowered to challenge traditional authorities and reinvent new ones, where emotions and feelings were valued as sources of knowledge and treasured cultural memories. Shaping new forms of social and cultural theory which acknowledge the embodying of cultural memories and the legitimacy of emotions and feelings, we can learn to recognize new imaginations through new technologies and modes of communication. Challenging the injustices and inequalities of globalised new capitalisms, Remembering Diana recovers alternative values in the echoes of those days, and ways of being that shape postmodern ecologies.
About the Author
VIC SEIDLER is Professor of Social Theoryin the Department of Sociology,Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is author of Transforming Masculinities: Men, Cultures, Bodies, Power,Sex and Love (2005)Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identity and Belonging (2000), Man Enough: Embodying Masculinites (1997) and Recovering the Self: Morality and Social Theory (1995). He has also published widely on social theory and philosophy, Marxism and critical theory, moral theory, masculinity and sexual politics in international journals.
Table of Contents
Preface: Embodying Memories: Echoes of Diana and the Re-invention of Authority
Introduction: Post-traditional Imaginations and Cultural Memories of Grief
Cultural Memories, Myths, Icons and Images
Shock, Public Grief and Spaces of Belonging
Authority, Masculinities and Emotional Lives
Citizenships, Multicultures and 'Community'
Grief, Public Space and 'People's Power'
Symbolic Resistance, Love and Relationship
Cultural Memories, Vulnerability and Human Values
Democracy, 'New Britain', Freedom and Self-Invention
Authority, Recognition, Voice and the Media
Conclusion: Postmodern Identities, Citizenships and the Re-invention of Authority
Bibliography
Index