Abstract

This essay explores how nonprofit advertising participated in refiguring an imagined American community in relation to Islam after 9/11. Examining how Muslim identities were packaged, marketed, and sold through nonprofit advertising, the essay compares three campaigns: the Ad Council's "I am an American," the Council on American-Islamic Relations' "I am an American Muslim," and the U.S. Department of State's "Shared Values Initiative." It demonstrates how these entities – a nonprofit organization, a civil rights group, and the U.S. government - sought to deconstruct the binary opposition between American citizen and Arab Muslim terrorist that emerged after 9/11 and produce a diverse imagined American community. Nonetheless, the essay argues that these PSAs participated in the formation of a particular exclusionary version of diversity that reveals the content and limits to American cultural citizenship after 9/11.

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