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Abstract
How are citizenships and nationalisms constructed, connected, and contested in the post-9/11 USA – performatively, affectively, and visually – and how do their relationships figure ‘Americanness’? This article takes up this question (1) by tracking how Americanness was advertised in the American Ad Council's ‘I am an American’ campaign and (2) by introducing the multimedia project ‘I am an American’: Video Portraits of Unsafe US Citizens, which engages the Ad Council's campaign as a practice-based protest of the Ad Council's advertised ‘Americanness’. The article traces how the Ad Council's campaign advertises what Evelyn Alsultany calls ‘diversity patriotism’. It also constructs a complex, mobile system of differentiation that marks some citizens as ‘safe’ and others as ‘unsafe’, which runs counter to the idealized notion of a unified ‘Americanness’ that it advertises. The article then examines how the practice-based protest project ‘I am an American’ takes these ‘unsafe citizens’ – US citizens who either will not or cannot make their differences normatively conform to the national ideal of the ‘One’ composed of the ‘Many’ propagated by the Ad Council's campaign – as its point of departure to reflect upon how citizenship protests function for and against citizenship, nationalisms, and various figurations of Americanness.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. My generous network of friends and family helped these funds go further and enabled me to self-fund the final four films in this series by providing accommodation, food, and transportation whenever they could. They include Lucy Suchman, Andrew Clement, Monique Fortier, Roxanne Doty, Spike Peterson, Candy, Heather, and Max Ogle, Cheryl Hill, Nigel Clark, Shelia Rye, Chris Olofson, and as ever Chuck, Nina, Lindsay, and Seth Clovis. Additional grants from the Lancaster University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and from the Lancaster University Friends Association helped to fund the production of still images for exhibition. My greatest debt is to those people featured in this project – Lupe Denogean, Phil McDowell, Jamine Aponte, Fernando Suarez del Solar, Cindy Sheehan, James Yee, Greg and Glenda Avery, Chris Simcox, Elvira and Saul Arellano, Shanti Sellz, José Matus, Ofelia Rivas, Julia Shearson, Abe Dabdoub, Will Potter, and Steve Kurtz.
Notes
1. I am referring to the National Defense Authorization Act, which at the time of this writing was passed by both Houses of Congress and threatened with a Presidential veto.
2. For historical background of the Ad Council, see http://www.adcouncil.org/About-Us.
3. My inspiration for thinking about ‘good grief’ and ‘bad grief’ in relation to this project was sparked by a presentation by Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma at the Melancholic States conference at Lancaster University. My use of these terms, however, bears no resemblance to how they used these terms and is not one that they endorse. See Chan and Sharma (Citation2007).
4. On the hail, see Althusser (Citation1971).
5. For example, the US singer Pat Boone recently labeled Gay Rights Activist working to overturn California's ban on gay marriage as ‘sexual jihadists’. Writing about these activists in the context of the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, Boone commented, ‘What troubles me so deeply, and should trouble all thinking Americans, is that there is a real, unbroken line between the jihadist savagery in Mumbai and the hedonistic, irresponsible, blindly selfish goals and tactics of our homegrown sexual jihadists. Hate is hate, no matter where it erupts. And by its very nature, if it's not held in check, it will escalate into acts vile, violent and destructive’. See Boone (Citation2007).
6. Thanks to Kate Nash for articulating this form of words to describe my project.
7. Films from my ‘I am an American’ project can be viewed at http://www.iamanamericanproject.com. For a book-length elaboration of the project, see Weber (Citation2011).
8. In his generous commentary on this project, R.B.J. Walker elaborated this point in grander terms, arguing that my project makes visible ‘the reversibility in all modern claims to subjectivity’. And if modern subjectivity is reversible, then the modern promise of progress and meaning the nation presumably guarantees cannot be insured.
9. Saul and Elvira's case is a complicated one. In my collection of films and in my PSA, it is not meant to represent how all foreign mothers of US children were treated by the US government, either before or after 9/11. Rather, because each film is shot as much as possible from the perspective of the person telling that story, the film about Saul and Elvira represents Elvira's perspective on their situation, a perspective Elvira did much to popularize before, during, and after her sanctuary stay with Saul.
10. Ahmed's quote refers to her description of a globalized economy of difference, not to any particular national economy of difference. But because the US national economy of difference is a colonial and post-colonial economy of difference, Ahmed's point applies to the USA.
11. Another way to think about this is through the notion of what Homi Bhabha calls the split that is inherent in writing the nation. As Bhabha explains, ‘In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation’ (Bhabha Citation2004; also see Bhabha Citation1990, Closs Stephens Citation2008, Citation2010).
12. Thanks to Tina Managhan for bringing Butler's formulation of this point to my attention. See Managhan (Citation2008).
13. Barbara Johnson's ideas of critical difference follow on from Jacques Derrida's idea of difference. In this context, both Johnson and Derrida agree that to construct singularity and deny difference is a violent act. It is worth quoting Derrida at length on this point. As he puts it, ‘As soon as there is the one, there is murder, wounding, traumatism. The one guards against the other, it protects itself from the other. But in the movement of this jealous violence it compromises in itself its self-otherness or self difference. The difference from within one's self, which makes it one. The one as the other. At one and the same time, but in the same time that is out of joint. The one forgets to remember itself to its self. It keeps and erases the archive of this injustice that it is, of this violence that it does. The one makes itself violence, it violates and does violence to itself. It becomes what it is, the very violence that it does to itself. The determination of the self as one is violence’ (Derrida Citation1995).