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The article discusses about the tragic and much talked about death of the Princess of Wales, Diana. As Diana disappeared into the underpass between life and death, her image re-emerged from the other side more powerfully radiant than ever before. Her famous face haunted every frame of media coverage thereafter, as if the spectra of Diana was returning from the beyond to articulate a demand for justice that went way beyond the need for a right and proper response to her death. The Diana who inhabited the spectral economy of media speculation surrounding the events of her death appeared to articulate with great clarity the spectra's long familiar injunction remember to learn and to live ethically. there was always the possibility that this was a phantom rhetoric originating from that phantasmatic space between life and death where nothing is ever what it appears to be, just another structuring illusion from the sententious repertoire that always feigns to speak like the just.

The article recounts the events leading to the tragic death of Princess of Wales Diana. In the early hours of 31 August 1997, the car transporting Diana Princess of Wales, millionaire Dodi Al Fayed, Henri Paul and Trevor Rhys Jones crashed into the wall of an underpass, killing the first three and seriously wounding the fourth. This fatal crash occurred during their high-speed flight from the paparazzi of the world press. In the aftermath of this accident an escalating series of incidents catapulted the death of Diana into a worldwide event. For instance, regular broadcasting schedules were disrupted, and in Great Britain they were virtually suspended as the news of Diana's death was announced across the globe. Crowds began to assemble in public demonstrations of mourning outside royal palaces and in common spaces. The media, struggling to produce coherent accounts of these deaths and of the growing scale of response to them, focused on and thereby created mourning Diana as both public spectacle and spectacular media event.

The article presents the preface to the book "Mourning Diana." According to the author, "Mourning Diana" is an attempt to respond to the critical imperatives and renewed perspectives of hindsight. The collection comprises a range of intersecting approaches and interdisciplinary frameworks in order to unpack the complexities of the Diana events. The book aims to elucidate the seemingly dramatic cultural changes and subtextual recuperations emergent in the enactment of mourning of Princess of Wales Diana. It considers the distinctive ways in which loss, mourning and popular spectacle mediate the reformation of common senses and social relations. In particular, this collection of essays emphasizes the performativity of grief and loss in the reconstruction of cultural identities and political hegemony. The volume is structured around a number of interrelated thematic currents. The first is what might be termed mobilized mourning in which the Diana events are examined as cultural-political phenomena, emphasizing their role in the reconstitution of political affiliations and ideological formations.

The article presents an introduction to various chapters of the book "Mourning Diana." examines the events which followed the death of Princess of Wales Diana, on 31 August 1997, as a series of cultural and political phenomena, mediated through popular narrative and social performance. It further explores the distinctive ways that "mass mourning" and the spectacle of public grief appeared to witness dramatic shifts in power relations, political affiliations, and cultural identities. The various chapters investigate the complex iconic status of Princess Diana as a spectral figure able to sustain a host of alternative identifications. The contributors in this book argue that the mourning of Diana dramatized a complex set of cultural processes in which the borders dividing nationhood and citizenship, charity and activism, social dispossession and royal privilege, private feeling and public politics were sharply contested and yet ultimately reaffirmed.