"Hamilton" and 'founders chic'

Hamilton the Musical is a huge hit on Broadway.

I read this review today. An excerpt below:

https://socialistworker.org/2016/01/07/hip-hop-and-the-revolution

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……….DURING MOMENTS like this, any criticisms of the new nation established by white settlers in North America seem to dissolve under the kitsch portrayals of a “young, scrappy and hungry” country.

We can tap our feet to the exhilarating string section during the musical bridge of the number “Yorktown” or the various “throw-down” debates at a Continental Congress, while easily forgetting that the North Carolina delegation to this same Continental Congress openly declared the rationale for the genocide of Native Americans, in these words quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s brilliant book An Indigenous People’s History of the United States:

The gross infernal breach of faith which [the Cherokees] have been guilty of shuts them out from every pretension to mercy, and it is surely the policy of the Southern Colonies to carry fire and Sword into the very bowels of their country and sink them so low that they may never be able again to rise and disturb the peace of their Neighbors.

Indeed, the Indigenous peoples of North America receive no mention in Miranda’s tragedy–a characteristic omission in art that emerges from settler-colonial societies like Israel or the U.S., as both the Indigenous of North America and the Palestinians must remain “other” in the “origin stories” of their occupiers.

To do otherwise would frustrate the sympathy that Miranda wants us to feel for the charismatic personalities he puts before us–and undermine the audience’s excitement for the rebellion in the British colonies that would never have been possible but for the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples from their land.

In this sense, Hamilton, regrettably, is an example of the treacherous connection between liberalism and critical narratives of national mythology, a partnership that often transforms sober appreciations of history into defenses of sentimentality. Despite a narrative so pregnant with the overtones of tragedy, the worst atrocities of American history are more likely to be forgiven or accepted by audiences than condemned.

Hamilton reveals the political limits of historical narratives built around the stories of “great men,” which to this day remains the method of biographies like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, which served as Miranda’s inspiration and resource as he developed the musical.

Hamilton is as contradictory as the bourgeois revolution it portrays. Nevertheless, these criticisms shouldn’t obscure the virtues of Miranda’s beautifully constructed and superbly performed work.

Alexander Hamilton was indeed a complex historical figure, who to his credit harbored more nuanced views on the colonies’ oppressed minorities than his contemporaries. His class background makes him a natural subject for Miranda’s noble effort to cultivate a people’s history of the early years of the U.S. “It feels important, because it allows us to see ourselves as part of history that we always thought we were excluded from,” Miranda told a New Yorker writer.

Indeed, Hamilton’s glorious images of armed people of color revolting against a white oppressor–a symbol of the white supremacy that underlies the capitalist system of today–certainly attest to some of Hamilton’s deepest and most profound radical aspirations.