Citizenship, Security, Humanity

Abstract

On September 21, 2001―10 days after 9/11―the American Ad Council launched its “I Am an American” advertising campaign (Ad Council 2004a). The campaign featured 30 and 60 second Public Service Announcements (PSAs) broadcast on US television in which a montage of US citizens of various ages, races, religions, and ethnicities look directly into the camera and declare, “I am an American” while emotive Americana music plays in the background. The US motto appears on the screen, first in Latin, then in English—“E Pluribus Unum,” Out of Many, One. The final shot is of a young girl—possibly Arab, possibly South Asian, possibly Hispanic. She rides her bike in Brooklyn Bridge Park across the river from where the Twin Towers used to be. Smiling broadly, the little girl waves a US flag. According to the Ad Council (which is the leading producer of PSAs in the United States), the “I Am an American” campaign “helped the country to unite in the wake of the terrorist attacks” by “celebrat[ing] the nations's extraordinary diversity” (Ad Council 2004a). The “I Am an American” PSA illustrates how US national sentimentality (Berlant 1991, 1997, 2008) and the technologies of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin 1969; Anderson 1983) combine to produce what Evelyn Alsultany calls “diversity-patriotism, whereby racialized groups are temporarily incorporated into the imagined community of ‘Americans’” to the point that “[d]ifference is identified as defining the nation” (Alsultany 2007:598). By employing a variety of cinematic and advertizing strategies, the “I Am an American” PSA constructs not only difference but also the ideal of the tolerance of difference as the foundation of the modern US nation (Brown 2006; Weber 2007), as if the US identity announced in the original US motto “E Pluribus Unum” (which in 1776 referred to the uniting of different US …