Artistic counter-narratives can challenge official projections of national unity.

Evidence

As a direct response and challenge to the Ad Council’s incomplete projection of a diverse U.S. citizenry, Cynthia Weber, professor of politics and international relations, produced a series of videos titled “I Am an American”: Video Portraits of Unsafe US Citizens. The main video takes the same form as the Ad Council’s PSA, featuring each subject talking directly into the camera and with the same music playing in the background. Instead of each repeating the same “I am an American” phrase, however, these “Americans” proclaim a very different truth about themselves and thus about their identity as Americans (see Figure 5.2). One boy says, “I am the son of an immigrant without papers. I am American”; an army veteran who refused to serve in the Iraq War and became a political refugee says, “I am a political refugee from the United States and I am an American”; Muslim chaplain James Yee, who served at Guantánamo Bay prison and was wrongly accused of being a terrorist spy, says that being a patriotic American means speaking out against the injustices he witnessed at Guantánamo. Rather than end the film with the U.S. motto, Weber ends it with a black screen that reads Ex Uno, Plurus (From One, Many), which Weber believes is “a phrase that more accurately captures the always fractured U.S. and the plurality of the citizens who compose it.” — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1165

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The ‘unsafe citizens’ portraiture — people whose American identity is legally or socially precarious — is a compelling framing device for fiction exploring what makes someone ‘count’ as a citizen.
• XREF: The ‘Ex Uno, Plurus’ inversion strongly echoes the political aesthetics of Sousa’s ‘An Easy Death’ and broader traditions of counter-patriotic art.