Dragging Hamilton
What would José Esteban Muñoz say about Disney+ broadcasting this fusion of Black culture and the Framers?
I write this on July 4, 2020, a day that will go down in United States history as an Independence Day Inside. I write this hoping that anyone reading it will take the time inside to reflect on the genocide and slavery that brought our country to our independence from England. Calls such as this have become a common refrain on the major federal holidays in this country in which I was born a citizen. But just because we’ve been here before doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat it with a sharpened critical lens. Our experiences have shifted, so our analysis of the events of the day should, as well.
That is why I was so excited to read Imani Vaughn-Jones’s article, “The Complex Violence of ‘Hamilton.’” Someone sent it to me after I read an Instagram story post from James Lee (insta: @dogtorjames) that issued a “hot take: no amount of hip-hop and rap can save @hamiltonmusical from glorifying slave-owners / human traffickers.” James encouraged us to “glorify theater that actually tells the stories of POC as opposed to merely casting POC in white roles”.
James’s post was the first I had seen someone come for Hamilton, and I was stunned and instantly felt I was in agreement. Imani Vaughn-Jones’s article gave me an even better footing for what felt like a really accurate critique of this show. In a searing and timely critique for the Fourth of July, Vaughn-Jones argued:
One of the show’s most famous moments is when the cast boldly proclaims “Immigrants, we get the job done!” While well-intentioned, this line is violent at its core because it absolves the Founding Fathers — and the white audiences watching — from having to truly face the brutality that came with the founding of America. The Founding Fathers were not immigrants. They did not move to a country in hopes of joining the culture, enriching the community, and bettering their lives. They came to steal, rape, and destroy. They came to “civilize” the “savages” of the land. They’re not immigrants — they’re colonizers. To call them anything else is a gross disservice.
I have never seen Hamilton on stage, and I do not have a subscription to Disney+ because my budget is too tight to justify adding it right now. I have only listened to the entire soundtrack in full a small number of times. I’ve enjoyed it, particularly as a law student who has been forced to read about the Framers a lot given the increase of originalist interpretation in the federal courts. But I could never wrap my head around the craze back when it was first popularized. How could people around the world — I was in Singapore at the time, and watched Singaporean college students rapping along to the soundtrack during school trips — be so thoroughly drawn into a historical narrative about a bunch of white colonizers?
I’d like to build on James’s and Vaughn-Jones’s amazing points by offering a performative studies lens from a late gender theorist, José Esteban Muñoz.
Muñoz published Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics in 1999. The book is complex and rich with examples to flesh out his disidentification theory, making my summary here necessarily incomplete. I’ll try my best.
In the most stripped down terms, most useful for analogizing Hamilton, Muñoz differentiated “imitative drag” —an application of counter-identification, which makes for easy, comfortable viewing for the audience by showing people what they would expect, i.e., a man in a dress — from “terrorist drag” — the application of disidentification, in which the performer embodies a persona (hence, acting as a “terrorist”) in order to destroy the construct from within, i.e., producing non-normative drag to breakdown what it means to be a woman.
Muñoz’s example in discussing terrorist drag is Vaginal Creme Davis, a black drag queen who used the character “Clarence” to embody a white, punk, male persona. In doing so, she could use her performative speech acts as Clarence to hold the exclusionary punk scene accountable.
That is the step Hamilton does not take. It is reclamatory: as Vaughn-Jones says in her nuanced piece, it has been career-making for so many actors of color who seem to have finally gotten their shot. By casting actors of color in white character roles, it even displaces whiteness — like the imitative drag described above. But unlike terrorist drag, white audiences can flock to Hamilton in droves because they are not at all challenged by this embodiment of the Framers.
Hamilton has allowed actors of color to prop their careers up on a story that (to my knowledge) does not make any drastic self-aware critiques of the characters. Like any show, the characters are flawed; the subplot of Hamilton’s wife helps to show that he is far from perfect. But by allowing audiences (who could pay for those pricey 4-figure tickets, or who can afford to pay for Disney+ amidst a pandemic and economic crisis) to enjoy the story told nevertheless without a theatrical self-aware condemnation of the figures involved (as was done so wonderfully by the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, Fairview, for instance), Hamilton lets its audience off the hook.
People can tune into Hamilton on the 4th of July, pat themselves on the back for watching art made by people of color for a couple of hours, and return to their normal lives.
Hamilton does not raise a challenge to the status quo. It does not center the lives of the Black and Latinx people who have been cast in it, as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s other work, In the Heights, did so well, and as the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, A Strange Loop, did phenomenally.
Hamilton is worth enjoying. But to celebrate it on the 4th of July without a dash of critique is far from revolutionary.
