The Prima Donna's Art of Politics

This chapter seeks to address the present political tendencies within scholarship on the prima donna in order to investigate the strategic volatility of notions such as sublimity, excess, realism, transcendence, transgression, and narcissism-terms that have had a particularly weighted presence in the ongoing prima donna discourse, and which also remain sites of important political contestation within the ongoing problematic of capitalist modernity. The chapter points out that in the 1990s, scholars were concerned to focus on excess, while recently they have turned to a more sober kind of materialist disenchantment. Framing its argument within certain themes of contemporary political culture, this chapter questions this latter position, without denying the potential threats that themes of excess can hold for those (like female opera singers) they are used to represent.