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[CJ] Is Hamilton Next?

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Os Trigonum, Jul 2, 2020.

  1. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Member

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    You understand the difference between white people's history and the confederacy, right?
     
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  2. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    nobody has said anything about the Confederacy, so . . . red herring.
     
  3. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Member

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    Then what is the point you are trying to make?
     
  4. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    does one have to be trying to make a point to post here?
     
  5. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Member

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    Let me know when you're being serious.
     
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  6. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    you should probably just report me to @justtxyank for not being serious. sorry to have offended you.
     
  7. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    this is from 40 minutes ago:

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/opin...essages-black-lives-matter-morales/index.html

    The problem with the 'Hamilton' movie
    Opinion by Ed Morales
    Updated 6:33 PM ET, Sun July 5, 2020

    (CNN)This Fourth of July weekend, which finds much of America reeling from a rocky first half of 2020, the mainstream and social media hype can be summed up in three words: "Hamilton" is back. The play has won 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for drama, and, according to Forbes, has generated over $1 billion in income from Broadway/London/United States tour ticket sales, publishing, cast recording and merchandising. A filmed version was released on the Disney+ streaming service on Friday.

    But clearly it has landed in a different landscape from 2015, when "Hamilton" premiered on Broadway. What Lauren Michele Jackson, writing in the New Yorker, calls the "righteous, multicultural patriotism" of the play seems now at odds with Black Lives Matter's strident call for radical change to an America where the legacy of white supremacy lives on. In addition to demanding an end to anti-Black violence from police, many protesters have focused on removing or toppling various statues and monuments of Confederate leaders, as well as Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Christopher Columbus and even one of Abraham Lincoln, because of their symbolism.

    Some eyebrows were raised when "Hamilton's" creator and lead actor, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and its producer, Jeffrey Seller, admitted in late May that they were guilty of the "moral failure" of not speaking up about the George Floyd protests. Last week, in a profile published in the Wall Street Journal, Miranda's father, Democratic political consultant Luis Miranda, spoke vaguely of having reached out to Black Lives Matter leaders "to begin to have dialogue" about how Hamilton and its "family" can work together with them.

    But while there has been at least one report of the use of a "Hamilton" quote "History is watching" at a BLM protest, to reassess "Hamilton" now is to note a crucial incompatibility with our current moment: Its hero and its message are essentially ambivalent while today's politics around America's racial sins requires taking a strong stance. Indeed, "Hamilton" is a minefield of mixed messages: Is our takeaway about its main character that he is a revolutionary hero or flawed philanderer? Is its strategy of non-traditional casting a triumph that allows people of color to "rise up" or are they undermined by the irony of how their embodiment as founding fathers ignores the fact that most of the characters they play were slave owners?

    ***
    While the play "Hamilton" has certainly acted as a positive vehicle for the exposure and success of people of color on Broadway, their subversive casting as white founders effectively erases the 14% of late 18th-century Black residents who were mostly enslaved in New York and for whom such vaunted positions were unimaginable.

    One could argue that "Hamilton" does not seek to fundamentally alter society with its feel-good version of the Revolution, especially since the values and triumphs it celebrates are drawn entirely from founding fathers who mainly did not consider people of color to be human.

    The success of "Hamilton" is in this way particularly striking because it opened on Broadway about a year after "Holler If Ya Hear Me," a play loosely based on the life of Tupac Shakur, one of hip-hop's most authentically political figures, flopped miserably. "Hamilton's" triumph could be seen as evidence that Broadway audiences were not so much seeking a musical about hip-hop per se, but a version of hip-hop that privileged a white liberal audience by allowing them to embrace blackness on their own terms, while including enough lyricism and Obama-era hope to embrace aspirational people of color -- some of whom also see themselves reflected in this play.
    more at the link
     
  8. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Member

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    Why would I report you? I've never reported you before. I am not getting your self-pity / victimhood schtick.

    People have a point to their postings, everyone it seems, except for you.
     
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  9. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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  10. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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  11. Ubiquitin

    Ubiquitin Member
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    jiggyfly, KingCheetah and Os Trigonum like this.
  12. Nick

    Nick Member

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    People really get their history from broadway musicals?

    I understand the revolt against effigies to confederate times... that literally was a movement to support slavery. I do not see a similar corollary here.

    And isn’t much of the issue that they just didn’t address other races? Not that the actually history was far off. And I don’t think its the job for entertainment or musicals to be all-encompassing or present every single issue, from every single nationality, during a period piece.
     
  13. FranchiseBlade

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    And the fact that while many want to remove confederate statues almost nobody is bothered by the musical, Hamilton.
     
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  14. Nick

    Nick Member

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    Indeed. How did this thread get to 6 pages???
     
  15. FranchiseBlade

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    4 pages is the OP posting articles about if people should want to cancel Hamilton, and two pages is people asking why he's posting about it since almost no one is up in arms about it.
     
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  16. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    lol
     
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  17. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    "Revolutionary ‘Hamilton’ arrives at an uneasy time":

    https://www.morningjournalnews.com/...lutionary-hamilton-arrives-at-an-uneasy-time/

    excerpt:

    So with theaters idle due to the pandemic, the film version’s fast-tracked streaming arrival — it was slated to hit movie theaters in October 2021 — is welcome. But a second societal spasm — the confrontation with racial injustice — makes “Hamilton” a problematic choice in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

    The nation seems different from a few years ago, ready for another revolution, this time from the streets, not from the drawing rooms where it happened in the 1700s. We are reexamining our dark history and who it really holds dear. Statues are toppling, old heroes are being interrogated and past indiscretion brought into the light.

    “Hamilton” — for all its progressiveness — is not immune to this reexamination. It looked at America’s past and raised its own statues. But it skirted the nation’s white supremacist origins, despite three minority actors playing white, slave-owning current or future presidents.

    Thomas Jefferson is represented as the one bad Founding Father who did participate in slavery. “Your debts are paid ‘cuz you don’t pay for labor,” Hamilton teases Jefferson in a cabinet rap battle. “We know who’s really doing the planting.”

    Yet George Washington’s ownership of slaves isn’t mentioned at all and Hamilton’s role as a slave owner has been whitewashed. “Hamilton” in 2020 crashes into Black Lives Matter and comes off less powerful, less revolutionary.

    In the show, Miranda’s line: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” was a plea to put Hamilton back into the history books, to reclaim this lost Founding Father. The genius of “Hamilton” is unchanged — how history remembers and changes.

    But in 2020, the question of how we tell stories has shifted in meaning. Who tells our story? That would be white people — and the show’s lens might scramble the deck but it’s still about elite, white males. “Hamilton” once asked us to look again at the birth of America, but it’s hard not to think that it may soon face its own kind of reckoning.​

    more at the link
     
  18. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    @Deckard might appreciate this one:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/11/opinion/what-hamilton-forgets-about-alexander-hamilton.html

    What ‘Hamilton’ Forgets About Hamilton

    By Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick
    June 10, 2016

    ALEXANDER HAMILTON is all the rage. Sold out for months in advance, the musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s remarkable hip-hop dramatization of this founder’s life, is arguably the most celebrated American cultural phenomenon of our time. Reported on from every conceivable angle, the show has helped keep Hamilton on the $10 bill and prompted a new nickname for this weekend’s Broadway awards ceremony: the “Hamiltonys.”

    Central to the musical’s power is the way it and its extraordinarily talented multiracial cast use Hamilton’s immigrant hustle to explain the most important political episodes of his life. “I am not throwing away my shot,” Mr. Miranda’s Hamilton sings early on, and it is this motif that animates everything that follows.

    In Hamilton’s tumultuous life, Mr. Miranda saw the drive and promise of the immigrant story of America. Already in 1782 the French immigrant Crèvecoeur had defined “the American, this new man” as one who moved to a land in which the “idle may be employed, the useless become useful, and the poor become rich.” Hamilton announces this entrepreneurial ambition early in the show: “Hey, yo, I’m just like my country/I’m young, scrappy and hungry.” The night’s biggest applause line, “Immigrants: We get the job done!,” proclaims that, contra Donald J. Trump, immigrants are the source of America’s greatness and renewal, not its decline.

    Mr. Miranda’s depiction of Hamilton as resourceful immigrant and talented self-made man captures an important aspect of his character. But the musical avoids an equally pronounced feature of Hamilton’s beliefs: his deeply ingrained elitism, his disdain for the lower classes and his fear of democratic politics. The musical’s misleading portrayal of Hamilton as a “scrappy and hungry” man of the people obscures his loathing of the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived.

    Hamilton mistrusted the political capacities of the common people and insisted on deference to elites. In a speech delivered at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton praised the hierarchical principles of the British political system. He argued, for example, that the new American president and senators should serve for life. Many of the Convention participants feared the “excess of democracy,” but Hamilton went much further. He wanted to bring an elective monarchy and restore non-titled aristocracy to America. “The people are turbulent and changing,” he declared. “They seldom judge or determine right.” They must be ruled by “landholders, merchants and men of the learned professions,” whose experience and wisdom “travel beyond the circle” of their neighbors. For America to become an enduring republic, Hamilton argued, it had to insulate rulers and the economy as much as possible from the jealous multitude.

    One of the musical’s most memorable scenes portrays Hamilton’s debate with Thomas Jefferson over the establishment of a national bank. What it doesn’t convey is Jefferson’s populist resistance to an economic plan that, in his view, supported the rule of commercial oligarchs who manipulated credit and currency at the expense of debtors and yeoman farmers. Instead, Mr. Miranda stages a confrontation between a hypocritical republican slave owner and an abolitionist visionary (“A civics lesson from a slaver,” a scoffing Hamilton says in response to Jefferson. “Hey, neighbor, your debts are paid ’cause you don’t pay for labor”) that conceals as much as it reveals.

    Hamilton’s opposition to slavery — reflected, for example, in his being a founder of New York’s Manumission Society — was not central to his political vision. The musical’s suggestion that had he not been killed in the duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton would have gone on to play an important role in the abolitionist struggle is fantasy. Even the lionization of Hamilton as the exemplar of America’s immigrant ideal neglects his ultimate endorsement of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it harder for immigrants to become citizens while allowing their deportation if they were suspected of disloyalty (he urged exceptions, though, for some foreign merchants and those “whose demeanor among us has been unexceptionable”). Jefferson led the opposition to this policy, and his victory in the presidential election of 1800 brought most of its provisions to an end.

    Our point is not that Mr. Miranda should have offered a more balanced portrayal of Hamilton. But the aspect of Hamilton’s life he celebrates — the self-making entrepreneurialism of the American dream — cannot be fully understood without including, indeed without highlighting, Hamilton’s insistent and emphatic inegalitarianism. Hamilton and his contemporaries understood these seemingly contradictory positions as two sides of the same coin. Ignoring one side, as Mr. Miranda has done, obscures their connection both then and now.

    Just as Jefferson’s republican championing of the people’s liberties depended upon his acceptance of a permanent underclass of slave laborers, so does Hamilton’s commitment to the success of the entrepreneurial self-made man depend upon his assumption that there would be a deferential political underclass to do the heavy work. Mr. Miranda’s emphasis on the contradiction inherent in Jefferson’s stance deflects attention away from the contradiction in Hamilton’s.

    Hamilton, with his contemptuous attitude toward the lower classes, was perfectly comfortable with the inegalitarian and antidemocratic implications of his economic vision. One has to wonder if the audiences in the Richard Rodgers Theater would be as enthusiastic about a musical openly affirming such convictions. No founder of this country more clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power. In this sense, too, “Hamilton” is very much a musical for our times.

    Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick teach political theory in the department of government at Cornell.

     
  19. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Member
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    Monteiro's followup to that article:



    excerpt:

    Loving Hamilton Enough to Critique It
    I brought the same attitude of excited curiosity to watching Hamilton just over two years ago, during the week it opened on Broadway. Since the soundtrack hadn’t yet been released, all I had to go on was the (surely!) overblown hype, and the YouTube video of the birth of the show in Obama’s White House, when Lin-Manuel Miranda performed the opening number at a poetry jam in 2009. I was eager to be swept away by the phenomenon that was Hamilton, and I also suspected that I would find much I disliked in the show. What I could not have anticipated is how much I would ****ing love the play; and how fertile a ground it would offer for exactly the kind of critical analysis that I had been exposed to my freshman year at NYU. Nor could I have anticipated how much resistance my writing that kind of criticism about a modern play, by a person of color and starring people of color, would elicit.

    When you first get a full-time gig as a humanities professor, the most important part of your job, aside from teaching students, is publishing a book that will earn you tenure. So it is a measure of just how much I loved Hamilton that I chose to take time away from writing my book in order to write an unpaid article about the show. The essay that I published in the academic journal The Public Historian argued that, while the play is praised for its racially adventurous casting, it in fact uses the talents, bodies, and voices of black artists to mask an erasure of people of color from the actual story of the American Revolution. The initial article was well received, with responses including kudos emailed by Junot Diaz, and four excellent, thoughtful responses by my colleagues commissioned by the blog of the National Council on Public History. However, as soon as interviews about the piece were published in Slate and The New York Times, in April 2016, personal attacks started showing up in my Twitter mentions.

    As I struggled not to drown in the tidal wave of negative comments — ranging from outright trolling by the usual suspects to very sincere distress from young women of color — I quickly realized how much of a gap there is between humanities scholars’ understanding of the work we do, and the impression held by so many of the readers of popular publications. Most of the comments were some variation on accusations of my not understanding that Hamilton is not actually a work of academic history; questioning my knowledge of the past; or alleging that I was myself “promoting stereotypes” for my discussion of the ways in which race functions in the musical.

    I realize that some would urge me to put “readers” in quotation marks; there is little doubt that most of the people who attacked me on social media or commented on the articles about my critique of Hamilton did not read past the headlines of the articles. But while many are inclined to dismiss these commentators as unqualified, I choose not to do so. Instead, I see their knee-jerk defense of the work that they adore as indicative of the very same forces that swept Donald Trump into office later that same year. Namely: our cultural resistance to nuance; our need for things to be black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. In this case: Hamilton was either liberatory and revolutionary and racially subversive, OR it was evil and bad and should never have been written much less performed much less lauded. Most of us who make a career out of studying, writing, and teaching about culture can never view cultural products as so one-sided. Indeed, what makes art art for me is its “multivocality” — the ways in which it draws on and remixes an infinite number of cultural products and practices so as to mean many different things to many different people — indeed, many things to the same single person. The very fact that every time I listen to the soundtrack — and no doubt every time I see the show (I’ve only managed one viewing so far — if you’ve got a spare ticket, lmk ;) ) — I learn new things is a sign that it is a truly great piece of art.

    This doesn’t negate the fact that “all your faves are problematic.” Instead, learning to see how all of our “faves” — whether they are Barack Obama or Big Macs or Star Wars or Buffy— how they themselves are embedded in and products of capitalism, of environmental degradation, of racism, of misogyny…to me, that is the work that cultural criticism can do. And while I realize it doesn’t make for as click-baity a title as labeling me a “Hamilton Skeptic,” the truth is that Hamilton is both a piece of art that troubles me deeply, and a piece of art that sustains me, that gives me life.​

    more at the link
     
  20. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Atomic Playboy
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    One would think... @B@ffled
     
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