{"id":806,"date":"2016-03-16T12:14:58","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T12:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/?p=806"},"modified":"2016-03-17T11:47:22","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T11:47:22","slug":"hamilton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/2016\/03\/16\/hamilton\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamilton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hamilton<\/em> is \u2018the musical of the Obama era\u2019, according to Adam Gopnik in a recent article in The\u00a0<\/em><\/a>New Yorker<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>It is a story about one of America\u2019s Founding Fathers, brought to the stage via the medium of hip-hop, along with many other modern musical styles\u2014from R&B and soul through to boogie-woogie and Britpop. And it is clear that the show’s prodigiously talented creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is keen to be associated with Obama, and vice versa<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Hamilton <\/em>the musical\u2014Miranda’s smash hit Broadway sensation\u2014we have the tale of the dead white man whose face is on the ten dollar bill, brought to us by a multi-ethnic cast of modern Americans. Miranda was born in New York\u2014the child of Caribbean immigrants from Puerto Rico. Most of the leading characters (with the exception of King George III) are played by actors of colour. On and off Broadway, the characters of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison\u2014all of them white Virginia slaveholders in real life\u2014are played by black or mixed-race actors. The music and casting of Hamilton <\/em>is bold and challenging. Like Obama, they offer a new departure: they symbolise the arrival of marginalised people at the heart of the national story. And like Obama they offer something refreshingly cool and irresistibly attractive. But perhaps (and perhaps like Obama) they serve to distract from what is in many regards a fairly conventional production.<\/p>\n

Like the debates about Obama\u2019s presidency, critical disagreements over Miranda\u2019s musical often seem to hinge on the question of whether this is a radical departure, or not. Is this a progressive piece of musical theatre\u2014transforming our perceptions of the Revolutionary era with its eclectic blend of music and audacious casting decisions\u2014or does it fail to deliver on its promises\u2014offering up a show hidebound by Broadway traditions and the predictable re-telling of recognisable\u00a0myths about great men and the founding of America? The fact that it is both can be gleaned from a\u00a0YouTube clip<\/a> of Miranda at the White House in 2009. Miranda presents his crazy idea\u2014of a hip-hop take on the life of the first Secretary of the Treasury told by the third Vice President of the United States\u2014to ripples of laughter. It is a knowing laughter, because Miranda\u2019s in the company of the President and his guests, offering them a familiar story about well-known characters. He gives it an edgy new twist. But he\u2019s rapping about the man on the money, about the birth of a nation and the American Dream.<\/p>\n

Last semester, I played that video to a group of second year students studying the history of the British Atlantic world. The narrative that Miranda gives runs counter to a lot of the work that we did on that module. He sets up the Caribbean as \u2018a forgotten spot\u2019 of the Atlantic World, in counterpoint to \u2018the mainland\u2019. Alexander Hamilton\u2019s tale, in Miranda\u2019s rhyme, is one of migration and renewal. But it runs a familiar detour around the beating economic heart of the eighteenth century British Atlantic in the Caribbean. The sons of wealthy slaveholding West Indian planters were more likely to go to Eton, Oxford or Cambridge for their education than to be dropped in the peripheral spot of a New Jersey grammar school, and the planters of the British Caribbean were so rich, content and powerful that they did not feel the need to join the likes of American slaveholders like Washington, Jefferson and Madison in revolution against the mother country. But that\u2019s a pedantic point. It is silly to expect Hamilton<\/em> the musical to have reflected recent scholarly turns towards Caribbean perspectives on British Atlantic history \u2026 and for Alexander Hamilton, New York and, more importantly, the American Revolution, did give him his shot at becoming \u2018a new man\u2019, a shot that\u2014as we all now know\u2014he did not throw away.<\/p>\n

It is perhaps more sensible then to ask whether this musical tests old assumptions about the American story of the Revolution. Some reviewers have claimed that Miranda\u2019s Hamilton in his rap battles with Jefferson puts slavery at the centre of the debate about the future of the Revolution. Jefferson\u2019s advocacy of decentralised power revolved around slavery, and some passages in the battles allude to this. For instance, in response to Jefferson\u2019s complaints about his scheme for the assumption of state debts, Hamilton responds:<\/p>\n

A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor<\/p>\n

Your debts are paid cuz you don\u2019t pay for labor<\/p>\n

He mocks Jefferson, the planter, and his ranting, telling him bluntly, \u2018We know who\u2019s really doing the planting\u2019. But these neat quips hardly put the issue of slavery at the centre of the show, in part because of the very nature of the show. That the American Revolution helped protect American slaveholders from the abolitionist tendencies of big government until the second half of the nineteenth century is not a very uplifting message for the kind of upbeat Broadway musical that Miranda has created. And neither are the realities of slavery, an institution that rested on assumptions by whites (slaveholders and non-slaveholders) that black people were, in one way or another, less than fully human. At some level most whites of the Revolutionary era bought into that view of Africans and their descendants, including Alexander Hamilton who, though an adversary of southern planters and some-time opponent of the institution of slavery, married into a wealthy family of New York slaveholders. Those realities remain obscured in Miranda\u2019s vision.<\/p>\n

‘This is a story about America then, told by America now<\/a>‘, Miranda has claimed. But while his creative vision and bold casting\u00a0breathe fresh life into the re-telling of that story, it skips over\u00a0important parts of what we now understand about ‘America then’. For instance, the lyric ‘look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now’\u2014about the new United States\u00a0in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War\u2014does not speak for all inhabitants of America in the 1780s. Far from it. For enslaved African Americans and for Native Americans, the Revolution was a disaster, strengthening the power of southern slaveholders and unleashing the westward irruption\u00a0of an expansionary new\u00a0‘Empire of Liberty’.<\/p>\n

Debates about Hamilton<\/em> the musical in the press have served to underscore the fact that it is at once a boldly radical and<\/em> a deeply conventional production. \u2018The theatrical, corporeal point\u2019 of Miranda\u2019s Hamilton<\/em>, argues Alisa Solomon, writing in The Nation<\/em><\/a>, \u2018is that America\u2019s history\u2014and its future\u2014belong to men and women of color as profoundly as to anyone else\u2019. The blogger Notinourstars<\/a> celebrates Miranda\u2019s sampling of multiple modern musical styles, and his casting choices, as major achievements, arguing that \u2018when the players change, so does the story\u2019. It certainly democratises popular engagement with the history of the Revolutionary era. But I\u2019m not convinced that changing the players, on its own, does that much to alter the story of the founding of America. What it does instead (for Americans) is to represent men like Hamilton and Jefferson as having been, somehow, all our Founding Fathers, and in ways that perpetuate myths about the young, scrappy and hungry slaveholding Early Republic\u2019s unique commitments to progress and liberty.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m inclined, therefore, to agree with Gopnik, who points out that for all that is exciting and novel about Hamilton, \u2018the story stays the same\u2019. As Solomon notes in her Nation article, Miranda has received accolades largely because he has so \u2018smoothly incorporated\u2019 rap music \u2018into an old, beloved form\u2019\u2014the Broadway blockbuster. She likens Hamilton to an older generation of musicals\u2014like Oklahoma or Fiddler on the Roof\u2014providing \u2018that sense of community and sense of promise\u2019 that come \u2018from a wistful idea of America\u2019. Despite all that is energising and progressive about Hamilton, then, it offers us a relatively familiar type of entertainment as well as a fairly conservative picture of Alexander Hamilton and of the word he and his co-founding fathers helped create via their achievements and dramatic beefs. Like Obama\u2019s presidency, it offers a hopeful sense of purpose\u2014in several important ways it represents a new vision of America\u2014but it is also limited and shaped by deep-rooted American traditions: old wine served up in a new star-spangled bottle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hamilton is \u2018the musical of the Obama era\u2019, according to Adam Gopnik in a recent article in The\u00a0New Yorker.\u00a0It is a story about one of America\u2019s Founding Fathers, brought to the stage via the medium of hip-hop, along with many other modern musical styles\u2014from R&B and soul through to boogie-woogie and Britpop. And it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57440,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22393],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57440"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":814,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}