SOURCE: Elam, Harry J., Jr. “The Postmulticultural: A Tale of Mothers and Sons.” In Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium, edited by Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi, pp. 113-28. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2002.

In the following essay, Elam compares the growing multi-ethnicity of American culture with the diversity and the identity issues of the characters in Cherrie Moraga's The Hungry Woman and Parks's In the Blood.

“We are in a postmulticultural time,” or so the student said assuredly. It was October 2000, and I was visiting a class on issues of diversity and social change in drama at the University of Minnesota, discussing concerns arising from August Wilson's now famous address to the Theatre Communications Group Convention in January 1996, when the student made this remark. It stuck with me. Because of our academic affinity for “posts” (postindustrialism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism), “postmulticulturalism” seemed the...