UI Press | James Bau Graves | Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

Cultural Democracy

The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

How America shortchanges the arts and community, and what can be done about it

Cultural Democracy explores the crisis of our national cultural vitality, as access to the arts becomes increasingly mediated by a handful of corporations and the narrow tastes of wealthy elites. Graves offers the concept of cultural democracy as corrective--an idea with important historic and contemporary validation, and an alternative pathway toward ethical cultural development that is part of a global shift in values.

Drawing upon a range of scholarship and illustrative anecdotes from his own experiences with cultural programs in ethnically diverse communities, Graves explains in convincing detail the dynamics of how traditional and grassroots cultures may survive and thrive--or not--and what we can do to provide them opportunities equal to those of mainstream, Eurocentric culture.

James Bau Graves is co-director of the Center for Cultural Exchange in Portland, Maine. An ethnomusicologist by training, he has developed open-ended partnerships with many of local ethnic communities, and has been active in presenting traditional and contemporary performers to their own and larger audiences.