breanna. 25. lesbian. enfp. hufflepuff. she/her. i have a lot of feelings about comics, star trek, cartoons, and alexander hamilton.
HERCULES MULLIGAN: Non-white, 20s-30s, Tenor/baritone, MUST be able to sing and rap well. Mulligan is the life of the party, dripping with swagger, streetwise and hilarious. Joins the revolution to get out of being a tailor’s apprentice, and befriends Laurens, Hamilton and Lafayette. Busta Rhymes meets Donald O'Connor.
This criticism of how Hamilton places its title character in context might be legitimate if Hamilton weren’t, well, what it is. In essence, Hamilton is a postmodern metatextual piece of fanfic, functioning in precisely the way that most fanfics do: It reclaims the canon for the fan.
In this case, Hamilton’s canon is history, and the fan, Miranda, is doing a lot more than simply adapting it. Like the best fanfic writers, he’s not just selectively retelling history — he’s transforming it.
Hamilton historians are viewing Hamilton as part of the “Founders Chic” movement — but the musical doesn’t really fit into that trend
Alexander Hamilton has long been a divisive figure in the annals of historical study, but in recent years he’s become a focal point of a historical trend many academics and history enthusiasts refer to as “Founders Chic.” Founders Chic first appeared as a term in a July 2001 issue of Newsweek and quickly caught on to describe the sudden millennial trend of lauding the forefathers.
A year later, in a now-offline essay for Common-Place, Jeffrey Pasley observed that “Founders” really meant “Federalist,” as most of the acclaim was centered on David McCullough’s dazzling biography of John Adams, with plenty going to fellow Federalist Hamilton on the side.
Numerous other biographies of the Founding Fathers soon followed, as did a 2008 biopic based on McCullough’s Adams biography. Soon after that, Miranda famously conceived the idea for the musical while reading Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography, Alexander Hamilton, which focuses on Hamilton’s early life as a bastard orphan on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, and emphasizes the way his formative years shaped his relationship to the US.
Analyzing the Founders Chic trend in 2003, the Atlantic wrote critically of it: “In revering the Founders we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements — necessary improvements — in the republican experiment they began. Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for.”
But although Hamilton stems from one of the trend’s byproducts, its function as a text is to do exactly what the Atlantic calls for and critique the history the founders began. The real-life Hamilton’s experience, passion, and ambition resonated deeply with Miranda, who is deeply concerned with the American immigrant experience. Miranda immediately recognized a fellow hip-hop artist in Hamilton, in that the founder had all the earmarks of a Tupac or a Biggie Smalls: innate intellect, brashness, unrelenting ambition, and a grand tendency to start drama. (A much-admired piece of recent Hamilton fan art notes he will “fight anyone, including himself.”)
[…]
Like countless fanfic writers before him, Miranda clearly loves his canon, but he expresses that love by tearing the canon to pieces. Like countless fanfic writers before him, he remains as close to the letter of authenticity as possible while also completely deconstructing the worldview he’s been given. Miranda uses his text to not only have fun with and celebrate US history but to critique everything about that history — something his perspective as an American immigrant writing about another American immigrant puts him in a unique position to do.
Miranda’s fanfic interrogates the mythos of the American dream, tearing down the idea that “America” emerged from a single cultural identity that belongs only to white European immigrants and their descendants. This is something Hamilton’s fan base seems to grasp innately. “Do you understand what it’s like to live in a nation where you are made marginal and inconsequential in the historical narrative that you are taught from your first day of school?” writes Tumblr user thequintessentialqueer in a brilliant explication of Hamilton’s function as a text: “Whose rebellion is valued? Who is allowed to be heroic through defiance? … Violence is only acceptable in the hands of white people; revolution is only okay when the people leading the charge are white … Hamilton is not really about the founding fathers. It’s not really about the American Revolution. The revolution, and Hamilton’s life are the narrative subject, but its purpose is not to romanticize real American history: rather, it is to reclaim the narrative of America for people of colour … If you’re watching/listening to Hamilton and then going out and romanticizing the real founding fathers/American revolutionaries, you’re missing the entire point.”
Again and again, Miranda emphasizes that this version of US history is being told by those other immigrants — the ones who, as the show notes, “get the job done,” and the ones who had no choice about whether to immigrate at all.
And just as he emphasizes that “you have no control … who tells your story,” he reminds us that he’s telling the story of American history now — and he’s telling it his way.
[…]
If we rush to defend Hamilton in this instance, we can be forgiven: History is littered with examples of women and writers of color having their work subjected to a higher standard of inquiry and criticism than the work of their white male counterparts. And that is precisely why Hamilton exists as a text: to elevate and celebrate the dismissed and devalued.
As fanfic, Hamilton interrogates the text of American history from the “wrong” perspective to reclaim that narrative for those who were left out of it
Ultimately, critiquing Hamilton for historical accuracy regarding Alexander Hamilton’s actual place in history is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Hamilton is doing as a modern metatext and as fanfic. The entire point of Hamilton is that the real Alexander Hamilton was a man for the 1 percent, not the 99 percent. The act of presenting Hamilton as a man for the people allows Miranda — and by extension, the audience — to feel as though they are actively shaping the future by making the past all about themselves.
The fundamental objective of fanfic, especially when it is written by women, queer and genderqueer people, and people of color, is to insert yourself, aggressively and brazenly, into stories that are not about and were never intended to be about or represent you.
In this way, Miranda’s aggressive over-identification and use of a Federalist Founding Father to represent modern hip-hop and immigrant culture is precisely as subversive, and for many of the same reasons, as the woman-authored fic I read last week about a white male TV character who gets pregnant and gives birth to were-kittens.
Hamilton unites the story of American independence with black, Latino, and Asian actors who were excluded from it, and in doing so allows these excluded citizens to put themselves back into the narrative. Hamilton is not just a story of history — it is the story of the ongoing struggle to make sure that people of color, immigrants, women, and other marginalized citizens are included in the sequel.
Fans of Hamilton don’t flock to the musical because of the way it transforms the Founding Fathers.
They flock to Hamilton because of everything the Founding Fathers never were.
So of course it is good to not just blindly praise things you like and to point out their flaws and all. That being said, there’s been a lot of criticism of a certain musical recently that I feel is mostly a result of people who aren’t theater people forgetting that this is a musical (which is the theater equivalent of a summer blockbuster) and not, say, an academic treatise or a deliberately and heavily symbol ridden MoMA piece (you know the kind I’m talking about).
First of all, while I on the one hand want to believe that a lot of this stems from the play being so popular, I can’t remember there being anywhere near the amount or the kind of critiques leveled at, say, Wicked, Phantom, or Les Mis. All of those plays had (and continue to have) all-white or almost all-white casts, and a predominantly or entirely white creative team as well. This obviously cannot be said for the musical in question (which I’m not typing out because I don’t want to get accused of tagging things when it shows up in the damn search feature no one asked for when i didn’t even tag it). I’m not trying to say that criticizing this musical is racist because that’s just a stupid thing to think, I just find it a little uncomfortable that this one is being held to much much higher standards than your average broadway money fest. And I have been made aware that it is a common phenomenon for people of color to face much higher levels of scrutiny than white people for doing the same or similar things. So I think it’s good to maybe question why this musical needs to be perfect, while the hundreds of truly mediocre stereotype-reviews which are mostly allowed to be mediocre and nobody really asks anything more of them. Again, I’m not saying criticism isn’t valid or shouldn’t happen, just something to think about.
Secondly, there’s a lot of people who are writing some really intense phD level stuff about whether or not the choice to make a play “about” America’s founding and then have a non-white cast is really progressive, and why and how it is or isn’t. These are good questions and good discussions, but I think a lot of them miss something that happens a lot in theater (but not film) that is really easily missed if this is your first big dive into the genre. (Looking at you, historian who I adore and respect and will therefore not name) I feel like we could also ask if it’s progressive to perform, say, Macbeth with an all PoC cast, since technically all the characters are still white and Scottish, and the playwright was a white Englishman, and the play is really divine-right propaganda, so if we perform it today, what does that say about our views on divine-right? It says absolutely nothing on our views on divine right, because here’s what you do with dusty old stories in theater. You transform them. You take the basic plot elements that speak to you, you take the character traits that speak to you, you take certain themes that you have decided either are present or can be present with some tweaking, and basically you steal those building materials and use them to tell a completely different story than the one the author (or history) originally intended. This is frequently good for getting your points across because, since audience members will recognize the building blocks you stole, they will a) be more likely to come see your show and b) they’ll have a base of understanding (oh, I know the storyline of this play because we read it in hs) from which they can jump into your messages. So, in a way, and I believe people involved in the production process have said this, the musical in question is not telling the story of gross dead white men. It is using the basic plotlines and names of these gross dead white men to tell a story about, among other things, immigrant excellence and the massive struggles to be seen as legitimate that people of color face in modern America, and the bullshit they have to deal with from the white power structure represented by the king, which is quite relevant to modern issues. It is absolutely fair to think that this was a poor storytelling vehicle. But I don’t think that saying it’s essentially 1776 with a PoC cast is really catching what’s being done with the storytelling.
There’s also a phenomenon that i like to call “look the bigots dead in the eye and rub your dirty hands all over that thing they love that they said you couldn’t have.” It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s not deeper than that. It’s never trying to be. It is literally just about re-appropriating a thing the people in power said you couldn’t have because you were [insert marginalized identity here] and being like “mine now, you mad?” This is not like… ever? a serious indictment of power structures or anything, but I do feel like it is a valid and important (and yes, progressive) response to being told you can’t take part in a very important piece of the culture you find yourself in’s mythos. Rey, Finn, and Poe in TFA is actually also a prime example of this. TFA doesn’t challenge dominant sci-fi paradigms, it’s literally just the same exact type of fun sci-fi flick, but now with the people white fanboys have excluded from the franchise as the stars. There is a place for that more surface kind of subversion. And yes, this means the musical is not itself without an all (except the king) PoC cast, and is in fact nothing if you fuck with the casting. The casting is not “the only thing that makes it remotely ok,” the casting is the point. Like… you wouldn’t say about Fun Home that it’s only cool because it’s got a woman cast as the romantic interest because that’s?? the point????? There are a lot of people who get so discouraged by feeling like they can “only” play roles like “the slave” in period pieces or can’t be in period pieces at all because of their race. That’s what this play is addressing, not like… whether or not the American Revolution was a net positive and what it, historically meant. You want that discussion, there’s plenty of historians better qualified to have it than a playwright.
Also like… this is a musical. Musicals=summer blockbusters. They are the stupid romcoms, buddy comedies, and action flicks of the theater world. I’m not saying that they aren’t a legitimate art form or don’t take massive skill or talent. But, just as films are trying to do a different thing in different ways than movies, straight-plays (of certain types) are trying to do different things in different ways than musicals. A lot of the things people are wishing this play did are things that are done in several straight plays that exist, and are things that (i think) are done better in a straight plays period in my opinion. Basically, if your criticism boils down to “why isn’t this a different play?” then maybe rethink it.
Lastly, as said historian had hinted at, I would LOVE for there to be more black historical figures portrayed well on stage. Ona Judge’s life would make a hell of any type of play. The crystallization of the free Black community of Philadelphia would make a fantastic play. (Somebody get on that pls) But this particular playwright is under no obligation to write those plays. He made a story that people said wasn’t for him and made it quite literally about his own experience and, as a classical theater person who does literally that with the works of billy shakespeare, I feel like that’s ok. This play can just be what it is.
Again I’m not trying to say you can’t criticize this play, just something to think about.
hamilton: here’s an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements
burr: why do you just carry that piece of paper around in your pocket
hamilton: *takes out quill* *writes*: also does not agree with the how i manage my belongings
“Trying to out-Eponine Eponine in this piece”
-Lin Manuel, page 85 of the HamiltomeAlright Tumblr. You have a whole BOOK to play with for your arts & crafts now. Have fun, don’t hurt anyone, make good choices!
Angelica, Eliza, AND Peggy. The Schuyler sisters.
I’m waffling on whether or not I’m happy with these. They may be done… or they may be scrapped and re-done! Oh well, either way I’ll be drawing more Ham.
Alright ladies and gentlemen, here it is. This is a list of songs referenced in and relevant to the musical Hamilton. Some are direct references that have been mentioned by @linmanuel himself and some are tracks which I think match the soundtrack either lyrically or musically or both.
Listen here , and read more for an in depth analysis on where each song fits in and why I chose it.
Happy Christmas!!
at least my dear Eliza’s his wife,
at least I keep his eyes in my life…
do you ever just listen to a song on repeat for three hours??
cause i have.
the white girls complaining that they can’t be in Hamilton are probably the same straight girls who bemoan actors coming out as gay like they would have stood a snowballs chance in fresh hell anyway
all i see in my head is everyone dancing around hamilton
