Book Review: Remembering Diana: Cultural Memory and the Reinvention of Authority, by Victor Jeleniewski Seidler

Remembering Diana: Cultural Memory and the Reinvention of Authority. Victor Jeleniewski Seidler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 201 3. 288 pp. $ 100 hbk.One in a series that examines the way memory shapes people and culture, Remembering Diana analyzes news reports and commentary to distill the legacy of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose funeral in 1997 was viewed by some 2.5 billion people worldwide.Seidler is a social theory professor at the University of London, and he poses a simple question, one that came to him as he and his family joined the London crowds that mourned Diana: Why would so many people behave as if they had lost a close relative or friend?"This was far from the wave of mass hysteria that some reporters talked about with easy disdain. This was not hysterical grief," Seidler tells us, "but it was deeply and personally felt."Dissonance between the scenes Seidler witnessed and authoritative media accounts he encountered over the years eventually prompted him to conclude that it was Diana's ability to bend the nation's power structure that people had recognized and come to grieve. Seidler is the author of several books, including recent titles Embodying Identities: Culture, Difference and Social Theory (2010) and Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multicultures and Belongings after 7/7 (2009).Seidler believes that to dismiss people's outpouring as irrational and un-British-as many reports did-is to misunderstand societal shifts that coincided with Diana's brief reign and crystallized in response to her death. Those changes include heightened awareness of marginalized people (because of government austerity measures and the global AIDS crisis) and greater cultural and ethnic diversity because of increased immigration. Seidler also notes that the rise of celebrity culture, fed in part by Diana's own televised tell-all interview in 1995, had left some mourners feeling complicit in the media chase that led to her death in a Paris car crash.Seidler argues that British institutions and the people who lead them have been changed in at least three areas, each traceable to the princess's own identity transformation and the media's compulsion to document it. Broadly grouped, these areas are as follows: Diana's influence on more humane interpersonal relationships, especially between parents and children; a remaking of the monarchy as a symbol of compassion; and a renewed interest in altruism.As psychology has showed and this study of our response to Diana's life and death underscores, personal and societal change is not magically conferred by loss itself; the only way to achieve positive growth, either individually or in society overall, is to work at it. To do that work, Remembering Diana applies contemporary social theory, which posits that one key to making sense of a society is a greater understanding of the role of human emotions and memory in shaping us, one by one.In chapters like "Memories, Myths, Icons and Images"; "Citizenships, Multi cultures and 'Community'"; "New Capitalism, Authority and Recognition"; and "Global Media, Future Hopes and Cultural Memories," this book identifies ways that Diana's story, as revealed by the media, became imprinted on ordinary Britons and so led to evolving expectations. …