Who Is an American?

Abstract

Cynthia Weber's documentary “I Am an American” is an audacious and creative intervention into the field of international relations (IR). It bypasses the usual conceptual boxes that the discipline imposes upon us since day one of graduate school: for example, only abstract arguments have force, only written articulations are acceptable, and only topics of “high politics” matter. With her documentary, Weber shows that we gain richer debates and insights if we extend these maxims: for example, abstract arguments and concrete emotions have force; indeed, one often informs the other; sometimes, visual images articulate what the written form cannot; and topics of “high politics” are not so “high” or “political” only when ordinary lives are marked forever, like losing a loved one to war or the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (viz. Weber 2005). In form alone, Weber's project shakes the discipline from its tendency to remain removed from and complacent about the very subject that accounts for it: that is, relations international. But, this documentary bears more import than mere form; its content blazes a pioneering path as well. Weber's documentary conveys at least three layers of meaning. 4 The first offers a dissenting voice to a series of images produced by the American Ad Council to promote unity through patriotism in the United States shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. These, she felt, gave an incomplete understanding of what it meant to be an American, especially for those designated as “unsafe citizens” (Weber 2008). The Ad Council's campaign, for example, did not include the poor, the illegal, the dissenting, the grieving, or the hateful in its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural pastiche of America. In omitting these Americans, Weber implies, the Ad Council risked propagating the very notion of an America that has no relation to the furies that unleashed 9/11. …