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 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 in the performance of Anglo national modernities.

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.

| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments 1. White Femininity in the Nation, the Nation in White Femininity 2. Racialized Maternalisms: White Motherhood and National Modernity 3. Fashioning the Nation: The Citizenly Body, Multiculturalism, and Transnational Designs 4. "Global Motherhood": The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity 5. White Femininity and Transnational Masculinit(ies): Design and the "Muslim Man" 6. Cosmopolitan Healing: The Spiritual Fix of White Femininity Afterword Notes References Index | "Shome presents critical arguments that challenge the seemingly innocuous tenants of celebrity culture by examining the strategies adopted by privileged upper-class white women to rejuvenate their identities, largely by extracting culture, resources and people from the developing world, and consequently are implicated in the production of neo-colonial conditions."—Celebrity Studies
"The clarity of her writing and her engaging media examples would make this an excellent text for students and seasoned scholars alike. Packaging analytical rigor alongside an exciting array of examples, Diana and Beyond is as compelling as it is insightful."—European Journal of Cultural Studies
"Raka Shome's Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture will take the field far in understanding how to cultivate a transnational attentiveness. The dazzling Diana and Beyond follows Lady Di as she twists and turns, appears stable, transforms, and the moves again across various global and national registers. Shome deftly demonstrates how to study something as seemingly stable as national identity without stabilizing or circumscribing its constituents."—Quarterly Journal of Speech
|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,...