Many voices, many opportunities

What is American culture? In Many Voices, Many Opportunities, Clement Alexander Price, Professor of American and Afro-American history at Rutgers University, provides a fresh, historical, fair-minded view of this hotly-argued question. Focusing on arts policy, one of the primary battlegrounds of the multiculturalism controversy, Many Voices, Many Opportunities convinces us that "the swirling debate about the history of American culture and its present character is quite unlike anything in American life since the early years of the civil rights movement.". Many Voices, Many Opportunities traces the ideas of cultural pluralism back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when such figures as W. E. B. DuBois asserted that American diversity, rather than creating a harmonious "melting pot," actually brought about struggles among ethnic and racial groups for equal recognition in American culture and the arts. Dr. Price argues for a pluralistic approach to culture and for a definition of national culture that is dynamic rather than rigid. He concludes that we need to change our perception of cultural and artistic worth if cultural pluralism is to succeed.