[CJ] Is Hamilton Next?

not fomenting anything. simply filing these away here so they're all in one place and I can access them later. you're the one falsely attributing motivation.

 

so you're calling me a liar. reported.

 

lol

 

"Hamilton – the diverse musical with representation problems":

https://theconversation.com/hamilton-the-diverse-musical-with-representation-problems-141473

excerpt:

The academic and gay rights activist Dennis Altman has highlighted how Hamilton builds on the beloved American Dream, where “anyone can find success”. It’s a romantic vision of how societies are supposed to function that complements the idea of overcoming systemic prejudices, including racism and sexism. But a close look at Hamilton shows how marginalised communities continue to be hidden or limited.

The musical ignores numerous examples of slave ownership. It fails to include “real-life” Black characters, including enslaved people, who are erased in lines such as “no one else was in the room where it happened”. It also omits representation of indigenous Americans altogether. While no one would expect a single show to tackle every issue in existence, the contradiction between celebrating diverse casting without representing people of colour is apparent.

All men are created equal
There is also a clear difference in freedom of expression and representation for the women in Hamilton, who sing in only 14 of the 46 songs. Not only do they feature less, but they are also defined by their romantic connection to Hamilton: his wife Eliza, her older sister Angelica who is his true love and his mistress, Maria Reynolds. Eliza and Angelica’s sister is jokingly known as “And Peggy”, as she has no real connection with Hamilton and plays a small role in the story. This is also almost her only line in the whole production.

The relationship between Hamilton and his mistress is also problematic. Issues of consent in their affair are apparent. When Maria appears in Hamilton’s office she asks for help because her husband is abusive, Hamilton lends her some money, walks her home and ends up in her bed. This is framed by Hamilton saying she looks helpless and the potential for sex is irresistible.

Sadly, this gender imbalance is reflected in the film’s marketing. New posters for the Disney+ release represent Angelica, Eliza “and Peggy” in balletic, doll-like poses while the male characters are presented punching, leaping, and dancing. Meanwhile, Maria is not represented.

As Hamilton the film becomes widely available to stream, fans and critics are excited to voice their fandom and their frustrations. These conversations show how Hamilton challenges us to think about who is permitted to perform on our stages and what stories we are told. This musical allows us to conceptualise the power of retelling history while also showing that stories about Black and Indigenous Americans, and especially women, are still not given space in this process.​

 

lol. this critique is from 2018:



excerpt:

Rapping the Revolution
Aside from the problems within the historical content of Hamilton, the medium of Broadway infused with rap holds its own set of issues. Before we can understand the problems within the show, we must first look more broadly at the context of rap in the United States. Despite persistent accounts of racial profiling, de facto segregation, and general discrimination, rap and its association with black culture has become a fetishized phenomenon among white America; it has “become so cool for white middle and even upper-class youths to spit rap lyrics, wear sagging jeans, call each other variations of the N-word or for white celebrities to wear their hair to mimic a style typically associated with African American tradition…” (Gutierrez). Over-policing, mass incarceration, racialized criminalization, and concentrated poverty in black neighborhoods, hardships that are reality for a large proportion of black Americans, act as temporary fantasies for privileged white Americans, allowing songs like “Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’, the rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, [to be] a party jam” (Whittaker). Indulging in rap music that tells the story of struggle becomes a way for white Americans to dip their toes into the life of those far less privileged, a stylish aesthetic that can be put on and taken off at the convenience of the appropriator, allowing them to feel that they too suffer and have been slighted.

Hamilton adopts this racialized narrative through its use of rap to tell the story of the American Revolution. The producers of the show may have only meant for the use of rap to be a stylish new take on the traditional Broadway style, but they inadvertently played into the use of rap by privileged Americans to feel like they are the suffering — poor Americans in the colonies hurt at the hands of a tyrannical Britain and the orphan Hamilton who rose to fame from nothingness: “I am not throwing away my shot/ Hey yo, I’m just like my country/ I’m young, scrappy and hungry” (Miranda as Alexander Hamilton in “My Shot”). Not only does the narrative of suffering whitewash the racism and colonialism in the American Revolution, as discussed in the previous section, it also provides fuel for the white audience to further embrace their momentary engagement with a historically black style of music as an expression of their suffering. Hamilton effectively sanitizes an instance of appropriating rap, “an art form of liberation and a culture of black self-love” (Whittaker), to allow white Americans to claim pain in their past, aching from taxation that does not help their communities and an un-representative democracy under Britain (yes, the phrasing was indeed supposed to sound scarily akin to modern day urban poverty and racialized disenfranchisement). In following with the way the Patriots in the American Revolution are viewed as people suffering and fighting for their right to live as they choose, Hamilton has them rap their woes. While Lin-Manuel Miranda may be a non-white writer and performer, his creation has the unintended effect of providing fodder for white Americans to further appropriate rap as a method to express their suffering.

Notedly, analyzing the privilege of using rap in Hamilton becomes even more germane when considering that Miranda won a Pulitzer Prize in Drama for it, one of many accolades the show received, including the Tony Award for Best Musical. In using hip-hop in a privileged space, Hamilton was able to curry favor among privileged reviewers, a feat that most rap songs are unable to achieve due to them being perceived as low class music (granted, specifically the Pulitzer Prize took a large step towards inclusion this past year when Kendrick Lamar’s rap album DAMN won the Prize in Music). Though it brought rap to a demographic of people who are unlikely to have encountered hip-hop in any form nearly as much otherwise, the award-winning show paradoxically claimed for itself success that is inaccessible to most black artists producing music, let alone hip-hop. No matter the benevolence of the intent, Hamilton maintains an enormous amount of privilege that favors best among its white audience.

We’re All Immigrants
The rhetoric used within the musical also carries its own weight worth analyzing. In particular, Hamilton employs the language of a universal immigration story, most notably in the song “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” in which Miranda raps, “Immigrants: We get the job done” (Miranda as Alexander Hamilton in “Yorktown”) in reference to himself, French soldier Marquis de Lafayette, and other immigrants to the colonies who fought in the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Yorktown. Throughout the rest of the show, the actors subtly reference the colonists as people seeking better lives for themselves in the Americas and fighting for the right to live independently, without fear of monarchic overrule by Britain. The parallel to modern day immigration narratives is purposeful and clear. Today, people immigrate to the United States to escape violence, to find work, to seek asylum, all hoping for a better life free from the hardship of the past. However, the rhetoric of a universal immigration story is not unique to Hamilton. Commentators from all parts of the political spectrum employ this language to bolster their arguments for and against immigration reform. Regardless of political orientation, though, the universal immigration story is highly problematic. By calling forth the idea of everyone in the United States being an immigrant of some sort to advocate for more inclusive immigration laws, those on the social left inadvertently equate the immigration stories of white Americans with those of non-white immigrants seeking refuge in the United States, from Syrian refugees to Mexicans escaping poverty and cartel violence. This act simultaneously drains the uniqueness of the socio-political condition of immigrants facing hardships both in their countries of origin and in the tough-on-immigration United States and allows white Americans to equate their hardships to non-white immigrants through the narrative of a common immigration story. Additionally, the logic behind “we’re all immigrants” leaves out two very important groups of people “who did not immigrate here: African-Americans descending from slavery and Native Americans” (Adams). By using the idea of everyone being an immigrant of some sort in the United States as a way to unify the general public, the universal immigration story perpetuated in Hamilton creates a sense of unity that excludes African-American descendants of slaves and native folks.
​

more at the link

 

Microsoft Edge . . . what da fook is that?

 

by the way, Clutchfans has a better search function. just sayin'

 

you folks do realize people have been arguing about Hamilton since it first came out?

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/20...lton-debates-history-race-politics-literature

 

jigg, I've said it before and I'll say it again. you are absolutely my favorite poster here. bar none.