Commemorating Whiteness
Commemorating Whiteness
The Ghost of Diana in the U.S. Popular Press
This chapter studies how the “official” and “commemorative” images of Diana Spencer invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood, and U.S. national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes visual technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, the chapter considers images of Diana appearing in “Collector’s Editions” of “American” popular magazines as People and Life to illuminate the visual scripts of race that define the relative social values of maternity and reproduction. It also identifies the visual production of the idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family, and suggests that they are coproduced and reinforced by different media forms and genres.
Keywords: Diana Spencer, U.S. national identity, cultural theory, visual technologies, material forces, race, maternity, whiteness
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