cultural pluralism, on difference, in the combined aspects of gender, class and
ethnicity. Confirmation for the validity of this view is offered by critics such
as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who have underlined the relationship between multi-
culturalism and sexual identity, the latter being defined as a "difference within,
something culturally intrinsic" ( Gates6).

As John Higham reminded us in a recent article in American Quarterly,
the contemporary notion of multiculturalism is at odds with the very
foundations of American thought, which pre-supposes a kind of universalism,
advocating the fusion of all minority groups. The American revolution
reflected a dream of inclusiveness. Since the 1960s, the era of the Civil Rights
Movement, this idea has been challenged by various minorities, which saw this
ideal of universalism as excessively hegemonic. The rights of the minorities
to assert the individuality of their own cultures is now flourishing in various
forms, not least of which is political correctness, i.e., a linguistic implication
of multiculturalism. In the view of some commentators, these newly
empowered minorities may in some extreme cases be led to display the
hegemonic tendencies generally exhibited by the established culture. A typical
example of this paradoxical reversal of traditional power roles can be found
in the excesses of political correctness, which David Mamet explores in his
play Oleanna, discussed elsewhere in this volume.

While the American Melting Pot, which foregrounds fusion, loses
importance in the American society of the 1990s, the new multicultural
playwrights, who emerged in the last thirty years or so, dramatize the facets of
what is now called the American mosaic, in which people are compelled to re-
interpret their ethnic and gender identities. This phenomenon was intensified
by the appearance of postmodernism in the 1960s, which maintained that the
center, including American traditional culture, could no longer hold, thus
introducing the notion of marginalization. The advent of deconstruction in the
1970s further contributed to enhance the status of minorities, as this school of
thought and criticism sought to undo the logocentrism inherent in Western
society. The concept of the ex-centric, coined by Linda Hutcheon,
progressively became prevalent in our postmodern age. A concomitant factor
consisted in the re-evaluation of the notion of power, i.e., the cement that
unifies or separates the various cultures interacting in a given society. In short,
cultural pluralism, or at least difference, "otherness," deconstructs American
universalism and liberal humanism, offering multicultural or feminist re-
visions of reality in the U.S. Essays collected in this volume examine the
various modes in which this process of re-vision works in different aspects of
American theatre and drama. It will be no surprise to the reader that most of
the dramatists considered here are postmodern. Indeed, they belong to the

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