Introduction: Questioning E Pluribus Unum

Abstract

In 2009 the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, in association with the US State Department, inaugurated a summer programme called ‘The Reconciliation of American Diversity with National Unity’ for British scholars of American studies. In 2010, it began an association with the US-UK Fulbright Commission before being discontinued in 2011 when funding was reallocated to establish new Fulbright Scholar Awards in the field. The seven contributors to this special issue are drawn from that initial Fulbright cohort and this collection is designed in part to commemorate a particular moment in the life of the discipline in the UK. The aim of the one-month programme was to explore the ways in which American culture had succeeded or failed to live up to the phrase on the Great Seal of the United States: E Pluribus Unum. True to the aims of American studies as an area of enquiry, this question was explored through a variety of disciplinary lenses including, but not limited to, those represented in this special issue: literature, history, art, architecture, intellectual history, and film. Although a perennial theme in both American studies as a discipline and the larger realm of American society and politics, the decision to run a course on the question of American unity and diversity at that moment in time came out of the perception that American studies was facing a crisis in the UK and required a new narrative through which to understand itself. In addition, it coincided with the resurgence of what was being perceived internationally as a new wave of American nationalism that had been damaging to the USA’s reputation in Britain. On 15 April 2009 there had been a series of protests in more than 750 cities across the USA. Nominally directed against Barack Obama’s tax policy, these protests signalled the large-scale emergence of a new conservative populism in American society. Going by the name of The Tea Party (recalling the Boston Tea Party of 1773), this group had numerous, diverse, and frequently contradictory grievances against the Washington political system. Ranging from resistance to so-called ‘Obama-care’ health reform and a ‘Keynesian’ policy of fiscal stimulus, to discontent with certain state government policies towards gay marriage, abortion, or the secularization of schools, the Tea Party’s multiplatform protest movement often seemed to be unified more by circumstance than judgement. However, threads of unity can be found in this diverse body. Standing on Boston Common on 15 April, David Tuerck (an academic from the Boston-based Suffolk University) announced: ‘It’s time for us to rally around a new cause, which is to return America to the principles for which our