Cultural Citizenship

Cultural citizenship has been part of a broader discussion on cultural pluralism that began in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then pluralism has undergone at least three noteworthy transformations, beginning with, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, attempts to preserve primarily European immigrant cultures vis-à-vis the state, followed by the integrationist civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and lastly, the mainstreaming of "difference" and a multiculturalism that began in the 1980s. Never intended to destabilize the authority of the nation-state or its ideology, these "politics of difference" have helped give voice to American democratic citizenship.