One of the most symbolic political speeches of the early 21st century was given by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Speaking at the Labour Party Conference a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Blair gave a lasting image of the political and moral chaos created by events of 11 September 2001. After discussing the need to extend freedom around the globe, Blair proclaimed ‘This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.’ Although Blair did speak of ‘the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant’ and ‘those living in want and squalor’, behind these now famous words was the implication that, at least as long ago as the symbolic end of the Cold War in 1989, relative harmony and stability had characterised world affairs. Perhaps bolstered by the robust economies of the United States and United Kingdom in the late 1990s, Blair's speech did not reference the Gulf War of 1990–1, the recent ethnic wars in East Europe or ongoing political turbulence on the Asian subcontinent, which might have detracted from the vision of a world of certainty shaken to the core by the atrocities of 9/11. Within this mythic structure – and with the ashes still falling in Manhattan – Blair detected a moment of rupture, of irrevocable change, which would take time to assess and even longer to settle down into a meaningful pattern.

Late 20th-century American culture is often characterised in terms of its plurality and eclecticism. The diversification of cultural forms, particularly in visual and digital media, and broader horizons about what constitutes cultural production have contributed to an environment in which being black, poor, female or gay (at least in theory) no longer stands in the way of talent or strength of vision. Young graduates are finding showcases for low-budget movies in the burgeoning film festival circuit; many new authors are being published, helped by the promotion of new fiction on the Oprah Winfrey Show, particularly writing by young black women; and multimedia performance and installations have extended the boundaries of what art is able to represent. Although the attempt to link cultural production to national politics can often be reductive, one framework for understanding cultural diversity in the 1990s is in terms of President Clinton's final State of the Union address. In January 2000, Clinton stressed that ‘never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little crisis and so few external threats’. Clinton's vision was both pluralist and centrist: he saw ‘enormous potential of communities from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta, from Watts to Pine Ridge Reservation’, but wanted to link this closely to a restoration of ‘the vital center, replacing outmoded ideologies with a new vision anchored in basic, enduring values’.